


who we used to be

by happyberry



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Actors, Closeted Character, Coming Out, Domestic, First Time, Friends to Lovers, Infidelity, Internalized Homophobia, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, Lovers to Not Friends Anymore, M/M, Soap Opera
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-19
Updated: 2019-06-13
Packaged: 2019-10-31 16:05:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17852783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/happyberry/pseuds/happyberry
Summary: It’s been ten years. Since they saw each other, since they sat down tonight, since Gabriel first noticed Jack in the casting room when they were both barely old enough to drink. Ten years, fifteen minutes, a lifetime. All the same.





	1. Chapter 1

Gabriel’s never been a suit guy and that’s true now more than ever.

He can afford a tailor these days and that helps—bringing in the jacket at the waist and letting out the pants to fit his thighs, all the stuff he never thought about when he was twenty-one and broke.

He hasn’t been twenty-one for a while now. Neither of them have.

“To be clear, I didn’t invite you,” he says, leaning against the open bar in the Grand Ballroom of the Rosewood Beijing. The bartender is long gone, persuaded away with a tip and a promise that anything found to be missing in the morning can be charged to Gabriel’s already substantial bill. Premiere weekends are always expensive.

Now it’s just him and Jack, like old times.

“I wasn’t under the impression you did,” Jack replies, tone steady. That’s the word for him these days—steady, graying, but handsome as ever. So the tabloids say.

Not that Gabriel goes out of his way to read tabloids anymore.

He shrugs, knocks back what’s left of his drink. Heavy on the bourbon. Started drinking in his hotel room this morning when he saw the guest list. Only reason he said yes when Jack asked to talk.

His agent’s going to be pissed, but that’s more or less her default state. Pissed and well paid.

“So what’s this about, then?” Gabriel asks, shaking the glass in his hand. All that’s left is ice cubes and the sound they make is hollow, apologetic for the lack of alcohol.

“Does it have to be about something? Shit.” Jack shifts next to him, turns to face him, and it’s been ten years. Since they saw each other, since they sat down tonight, since Gabriel first noticed him in the casting room when they were both barely old enough to drink. Ten years, fifteen minutes, a lifetime. All the same.

“Used to be, me and you, this was just a Saturday night.”

“Used to be,” Gabriel agrees. He sets his glass firmly down, folds his hands together. “Not anymore. So now, I figure, this does have to be about something.”

Jack huffs, a sound halfway between laughter and exasperation. Their last few months living together in one beat, the waning of a relationship. Things that were once endearing became annoyances, both of them worn down by it all.

“Alright then, it’s not why I’m here, but you’ve heard about the reunion, yeah?” Jack’s own drink is still mostly full, a virgin mix of a couple different fruit juices and some grenadine syrup. That’s different.

“Sure, I’ve heard rumors. Not tempted to join, not interested, but sure—I heard about it.” Gabriel pushes away from the bar and heads around the back, intent on making himself another. His stomach feels empty, he hasn’t eaten all day.

The press circuit has never been his forte, even back when it was practically required to be.

“Ana’s already agreed to it. And Reinhardt, though I’m sure that’s less of a surprise to you.”

“He always did like the attention.” Gabriel finds the bourbon where he left it, along with a bottle of bitters and cup of sugar next to an empty glass and a bucket full of perfectly shaped ice cubes. “I’ll admit to not expecting Ana, though. She's the only one who's ever been able to surprise me. No offense.”

“None taken.” Jack raises his glass.

One of the few things that hasn’t changed for them both—their respect for Ana Amari.

“So sending you here is, what? Supposed to entice me to sign up?” Stirrer in his glass, Gabriel keeps his eyes on the drink in front of him. He’s never been one for eye contact, had to train himself to be good at it, and the habit of avoiding it is kicking in now.

He does see Jack shake his head in his peripheral vision. “You’re being an asshole. I told you that’s not why I’m here. I’m just talking to you. Remember when we used to do that—just talk?”

“Don’t remember doing a lot of talking with you, no.” Gabriel has pretty good timing. The clink of the ice cubes being added are like an audible period.

He glances at Jack just in time to see him roll his eyes, and catch the corner of his mouth twitching upwards and that—okay. That makes him ache for the lack of something he’s gotten good at pretending he never had. He knocks his hand against his glass and the bourbon goes spilling over the edge of the bar.

“Fuck.” He grabs a washrag that’s draped over the sink next to him, starts sopping up the mess. He hears Jack open his mouth and then close it, probably thinking better of offering to help.

Smart guy. Always was.

“Why are you here, Jack?” He focuses on the motion of his hand, cleaning up the mess he’s made.

“I know you don’t want to hear it—”

“Then don’t say it.”

“But you asked, so what am I supposed to do? Dammit, Gabe, you’re always like this. Mad when I’m honest with you, mad when I lie, mad when I don’t say anything.”

“Yeah, it’s real fuckin’ unreasonable of me, to be pissed off at you for ambushing me here.” Gabriel throws the washrag to the side, the sopping wetness of it making a disgusting sound as it hits against the bottom of the sink. He doesn’t want another drink at this point, just wishes someone else was around. Wishes he wasn’t well aware he could walk away from this at any time.

Truth is, as always, he’s more angry with himself than anyone.

“I don’t know how I used to stand being around you so much,” Jack says, hand on his glass, look on his face that Gabriel’s seen enough before to read with ease.

_This was a mistake._

“I think the dick up your ass helped,” Gabriel offers and Jack barks out a laugh, not unkindly. It’s a weird thing, this moment right now. The only people in the world who know the whole truth of the situation, looking at each other across an empty bar.

“I think you’re probably right.” Jack rubs a hand over his mouth and shakes his head. He doesn’t sound like he believes it and if Gabriel is honest with himself, he feels the same way. “I’ll take it—I’ll take it that’s a hard no on the reunion, then.”

Ten, twenty, almost thirty years ago, back to the day they first met—they were different people then, no spilled drinks between them, no bad blood.

Gabriel remembers parts of it all when he least expects it, the slanting smile on Jack’s face when he was squinting into the sunlight, reading lines over melted bowls of ice cream, the two and a half years of sharing a split level rental house, when he allowed himself to think _maybe this is it, maybe this is as good as it gets and maybe it’ll stay this way_.

The thing was that he was only half right. It was as good as it got, but it was never going to stay that way.

So he looks at Jack, here and now, and he says, “You know what, fuck it. I’m in.”

—

Gabriel has been in a hundred thousand casting calls since he was discharged. Or, anyway, that’s how it feels.

Every other pilot right now is looking for a built Latino guy, and he’s in no position to be picky, so he’s been trying out for them all, even the shitty stereotypical ones. So far he’s been in two commercials, one for deodorant and another for a security company, playing the guy who was trying to break into a house. His agent says work is work and the guy isn’t wrong.

Gabriel _wishes_ he was wrong, like hell.

So it’s a sticky hot summer day when he auditions for yet another pilot episode, this time a daytime soap drama that wants a Latino guy who looks like he could have been in the military.

“I _was_ in the military,” Gabriel says to his agent. “You know, like, for real. So I think I have a leg up.”

Problem is, now that he’s in the room he’s not so sure. He’s positive he’s one of the only guys here with actual active duty experience, but if he was a Hollywood exec he doubts he’d be able to tell the difference.

There’s only one guy, a white guy, that he sizes up to have served. Mostly he only notices because the guy is calm, mouthing words off the script they were given to himself, focusing on the task at hand, no cheesy grin on his face. The rest of these guys are just kinda…plastic.

White guy looks like a prototypical all-American Ken doll, complete with blonde hair and blue eyes, but he doesn’t look fake. Just one of those people who really is _that_ good looking.

Gabriel looks away when he realizes he’s been staring and mirrors Ken’s actions, because it makes sense. He doesn’t want this part so much as he just wants _something_ , and the only way to get it is going to be to want it more than anyone else in the room.

The role, on its own, isn’t anything special. An honorably discharged Marine who’s back in town, going to college, and has a troubled past. Gabriel’s willing to bet that the half of the room full of white guys is auditioning for a character without any kind of troubled past, but he’s in a place where beggars can’t be choosers, so he runs through lines in his head and edits them as he sees fit.

Less awkward Spanish code switching, that should primarily happen when his character is making a spitting aside against someone he doesn’t respect or talking with Spanish-speaking family members. Less unnecessary street slang, more military speak.

“I mean, he’s right out of serving, for fuck’s sake,” he mutters to himself, glancing up from the script in time to catch the gaze of Ken himself. He looks away quickly, rubs at his cheek, and breathes in.

It takes about an hour before he’s called in, paired up with a guy a head shorter than him. He’d had some hopes regarding a more fortuitous match up, but Ken had been pulled fifteen minutes ago, and the only good thing about that was Gabriel had heard his name.

“ _Jack Morrison_.”

And that name made Gabriel think, fuck, he was made to be on the cover of teenage girl magazines, smiling and wearing swim trunks next to a splash headline that promised intimate first kiss details. Those were the kind of magazines Gabriel had stolen from his older cousin’s room and jacked off to when he was twelve, too scared to go looking for material of his own.

He’s asked for his name, and he feels good saying it out loud. Gabriel Reyes could be on the cover of a magazine, too. He’s got what he thinks is referred to as a crooked grin, when he bothers to smile. His mother always told him he was handsome, and he always thought there was a chance she wasn’t wrong.

He reads lines on autopilot, gets a drink of water when he asks for it, and has to bite his tongue to stop himself from saying something to the short guy he’s paired with when he over-dramatically pronounces _Ramirez_ , rolling his r’s like he’s doing his oral exam in ninth grade Spanish class.

They get shuffled back into the room they were waiting in before, with substantially less people in it. Gabriel figures this means he survived the initial culling, and he’s relieved to see that Jack Morrison did, too.

It’s them and four other guys now, and Gabriel isn’t much of a praying man but he asks and he receives this time around. He and Jack are plucked out of the room less than a half hour later, and told to wait on standby before they go in front of the execs.

“Hey, you mind if, uh, I change some of this stuff?” Gabriel brandishes the script, immediately feeling ridiculous for waving it around dramatically.

“Huh?” Jack’s eyebrows raise prettily. Gabriel didn’t know that was possible. “I mean, sure, but what parts?”

“I think—well, I was gonna respond in military time when you asked how late it was. It seems more natural, considering the character. And I mean, I do it all the time, so.”

“Oh, you too?” Even his grin is perfect, straight teeth for miles. Gabriel’s father was an orthodontist and he idiotically wants to ask how long Jack had braces for. Maybe he still wears a retainer.

“Yeah, um. So I thought it’d be, like. More authentic?” Gabriel had braces for four years, and always thought it would’ve been hard to make out with them on. He got them off before that was a concern, and for years afterwards was a little bit obsessed with the smoothness of teeth under his tongue.

Jack, he thinks, probably has pretty smooth teeth.

“Sure, I like that,” Jack says, flipping through the script to the part Gabriel is talking about. “What’s your name again?”

“Gabe—Gabriel Reyes.”

Jack looks ready to respond in kind, but they’re called to the main room before he can, put in front of a lineup of white guys in button ups looking at them emotionlessly, scripts on their laps and pens in their hands.

It’s fifteen minutes of retreading the script and Gabriel trying to forget that all he’s been able to land before this is two commercials.

With Jack he finds it easier to forget that than usual. Jack doesn’t over-commit to _Ramirez_ —he adds little things to his performance, walks around the room and asks if they can start over when he feels like he didn’t get a line just right.

Gabriel is impressed and he can tell the execs they’re in front of are, too. It only gives him a sinking feeling in his stomach when they get to the end of it all and he can feel everyone’s eyes moving away from him to the obvious standout in front of them.

Jack Morrison, who seems to exist on the rare intersecting point of cover boy and good actor.

“I like how you changed some of the dialogue to fit the ex-military nature of the characters,” one of the writers is saying to Jack. Gabriel feels the automatic urge to punch something—preferably some _one_.

“That was Gabriel’s idea,” Jack says, quickly, hands up. “Don’t give me credit for that. Really, for the whole scene. I didn’t do nearly as well last time.”

Gabriel is suddenly swarmed, hit with questions, _what’s your name again_ and _remind me about your background_. He answers as best as he can, but he’s more than a little blindsided, drained of aggression and resentment quicker than he’s ever been before.

And when he gets the call a couple of weeks later, his first question is who got the other male lead, because he just needs to hear that name again, alongside his own. The two of them together, like something out of a dream.

—

Gabriel shakes himself from staring at the curve of Jack Morrison’s shoulder. He’s got to stop getting lost in shit like that, but it isn’t easy.

Two months into filming and he’s long gone, the way you get when a connection is just right. He got Jack to drink with him after they wrapped on their first episode and that was a long night. Parking lot wasted and sitting on the hood of Gabriel’s car, skipping bottle caps over gravel and pretending they knew shit about the night sky.

Yeah, he’s a goner, signed and sealed since his agent told him to get his ass down to casting for this thing, since maybe even before then. The day he signed up for the Marines, the day his dad passed, the day he broke his arm in second grade and didn’t cry. Back and back.

Him and Jack feels that way, something that everything else was always leading up to.

They’re on set, an endless line of flimsily built living rooms that turn into bars and classrooms and then living rooms again. Jack’s pouring over the script with the only other actor they’ve spent time with outside of filming, Ana Amari.

It’s been sobering to watch her and Jack treat this stuff seriously, because Gabriel has had half a mind to not even bother since the beginning.

Ana rolls her eyes at him more than he’d like her to, mostly due to the fact that he’s always earning it. She’s not flippant about it, just exasperated by his general existence, the nature of who he is.

“Gabriel,” she said, the third day they knew each other, “I would appreciate if you would keep the theatrics to a minimum.” She says this on a soap opera set, in-between takes for a scene where she’s on a rampage, her character demanding she be given part of the inheritance she’s owed as the love child of an estranged father.

And Gabriel had felt so cowed, so small, he’d only said, “I mean, okay. I mean, yeah.”

She has a way of doing that to him, and to everyone.

Right now, she shoots him a look over her shoulder, a pointed, eyebrows raised kind of look. He furrows his brow and rearranges himself in his chair. Truth is, he hasn’t been that careful with his staring.

He doesn’t figure Jack will notice, at least not any time soon, because Jack’s the kind of person who has unknowingly gotten used to people staring at him. He’s stupidly handsome that way, possibly the only person in the world who actually has a chiseled jaw.

And it’s not like Gabriel thinks he’s not good looking, not by a long shot, he’s just not… _that_. He’s rougher around the edges, not as prone to smiling for other people, and not nearly as outgoing.

To his dismay, people tend to think he’s angry with them, even when that couldn’t be further from the truth.

He’s more likely to catch someone glancing at him nervously than he is to catch someone staring. He wasn’t made to stare at.

It translates surprisingly well to television, he’s been told. Cameras and lighting soften his face just enough when the time is right, and pull out the edges when they’re needed. The lead makeup artist told him he has what’s called a versatile bone structure while she put concealer under his eyes.

Gabriel didn’t know what concealer was two months ago, much less where to put it on his face.

A lot of this is new to him, but not to Jack and Ana.

Ana has had supporting roles in television movies and teen dramas, along with half a dozen guest roles in procedurals. She’s a young, but stalwart presence on daytime TV already, a familiar face even if she’s not quite a household name.

Jack has an unsuccessful television pilot under his belt, guest appearances and a cornucopia of commercial gigs. Catalog spreads, crew neck sweaters and an apparent boxer ad that he refuses to talk about when it’s brought up. Said boxer ad was how Gabriel found out that when Jack is embarrassed the tips of his ears turn red.

In-between takes, Jack and Ana run lines and takes sips of water, commiserating over shared experiences in a way that makes Gabriel jealous in the worst, most unearned way. He usually sits off to the side, pretending to glance through the script when he remembers to.

They get the scripts day of, paper still hot, and that’s part of the reason Gabriel’s agent pushed him to audition for this. His memory is a physical thing, air tight and sealed, things get trapped in there. He doesn’t forget birthdays, still remembers his locker combination from eighth grade, and would love to forget the home phone number of his ex from high school.

“Wish I had that superpower,” Jack tells him later that day while one of the hairdressers gels his bangs to the side and stands back while her assistant takes a continuity picture.

“It’s served me well a time or two,” Gabriel admits, thinking of time spent in the field, always having an answer for commanding officers and gunners, yelling out instructions without a second thought. Things are less dire here, but he feels the pressure to perform all the same.

“You’ll help me then?”

“...Maybe.”

“You will.”

Jack smiles self-indulgently, confident that he’ll get what he wants for one bright moment before he’s hidden once more, the makeup artist diving upon him as they catch wind of some untouched area of his face, and Gabriel finds himself smiling in quiet moments throughout the rest of the day.

That’s how he knows he’s got it bad.

—

When the newspaper is flung from the hand of the delivery boy swinging past on his bike it hits the concrete of the front porch with a satisfying _thwap_. Gabriel knows this because he’s, against all odds, a morning person these days.

He eats oatmeal with cinnamon sprinkled on top and he’s trying not to drink coffee anymore, at least when Jack’s paying attention.

“Decaf is an option,” Ana had told him a couple of weeks ago, but he can’t wrap his head around the concept of such a thing. Why even drink coffee, in that case? He’ll stick to orange juice instead. Pulpless, of course. He’s not a monster.

The place he and Jack have rented together for the better part of a year now is a split level with grey siding, a detached garage, and a postage stamp size backyard that's half concrete, half pool. At four in the morning everything around them is still save for the hum of highway traffic in the distance and the two of them can run through the neighborhood, silent except for their feet hitting the pavement.

Five in the morning is for breakfast, the aforementioned oatmeal a staple of Gabriel’s diet, while bland, wheat cereal does the job for Jack. They talk business if they’re in the mood for it, but mostly they trade tidbits of news, things they heard from other cast members and from their families.

“They’re finally going to reveal that the other Shimada brother isn’t actually dead,” Jack tells him one morning.

“Another one of my cousins is getting married,” Gabriel tells him in response.

Their lives bounce off one another all the way to set where they separate to get hair and makeup done. Gabriel usually falls asleep in his seat, but Jack is known to be a charmer with half the hair stylists in love with him on any given day.

From there, it’s hard to know how their day will be spent. Scripts are churned out mass production style so there’s always something new to attempt to memorize. A lot of the time, Gabriel reads his lines five minutes before he delivers them in front of a camera. He says stupid shit sometimes, and tries to negotiate to say slightly less stupid shit when he can.

He dreads working opposite Reinhardt, the big idiot, and Angela, who’s too young to be chiding him for his eating habits, but does it all the same. Ana drives him nuts in a similar way, but he respects her enough that it doesn’t make him prickly towards her.

Everyone knows that Gabriel is most easily tamed by Jack. He sometimes thinks the writers throw them in scenes together when he’s driving everyone else crazy, but it’s hard to tell. He and Jack are meant to be foils to one another, and their relationship is the backbone of the show. The foundation on which everything else is built.

Three years in and Gabriel can see the parallels between his two lives, on screen and off. He only talks about it with a handful of people: Ana, his mother, and Jack. Always Jack.

“It’s a wonder you’re not sick of me,” he says one night, halfway home and sitting behind brake lights on the 405, some accident a couple of miles ahead.

“That’s a stupid thing to say,” Jack replies, adept at dealing with his bullshit by this point.

Gabriel just grins and thinks, as he always does, that Jack has no idea the things he’d like to do to him. Pull him apart, lick at his seams, hand under Jack’s chin as he makes him _beg_. He always thinks about all that at the worst times, like when it's just the two of them and Jack’s right there, looking pretty and exhausted behind the steering wheel.

They get home with little time to spare, lucky that there’s no grocery shopping to be done, though that’s become one of Gabriel’s favorite things to do. Grocery shopping with Jack, haggling over the price of eggs and wondering if anyone around them thinks what he wants them to think.

Jack won a bet they had about how long it would take to get home, so he gets first shower. Gabriel gets to sit on the couch with Game Show Network on and half a hard on because he can hear Jack singing along to the radio through the thin walls, making it impossible to forget that he’s in there.

Gabriel shakes his leg up and down and tries to focus on Jeopardy. His favorite part is when somebody gets the answer wrong because they didn’t phrase it as a question.

He’s mostly forgotten about the whole situation when Jack pokes his head into the living room and says, “So, uh, the hot water ran out.”

“What?” Gabriel stares, mind immediately blank. Jack’s got a towel around his waist and it’s not that he can’t handle the situation. It’s never been that. It’s always been the domesticity of it all, the ease with which he could see himself leaning in and ruining everything in one fell swoop if he let himself get carried away.

“The hot water—dunno what happened. I wasn’t in there that long, was I?”

Not even half the episode of Jeopardy so no. Gabriel shakes his head, shrugs, leans back against the couch. “I’ll live. I can shower after we run in the morning.”

Jack hangs around in the hallway for a second, chest still wet and gleaming, getting water on the hardwood floors before he nods. “Alright.”

When he’s gone, Gabriel lets out a low exhale. Jesus. He’s not sure how much longer he can live like this, and it doesn’t get any easier when Jack emerges from his room again, hair still damp and in a tank top and shorts, sitting next to him on the couch.

“Dinner? Quesadillas?”

They’ve been on a quesadilla kick lately—cheap flour tortillas, vegetables from the farmer’s market, enough cheese to kill a man.

Jack will get ingredients prepped while Gabriel gets the oven on, and the night will end with killing vampires in video games and staining paper plates all the way through. Gabriel will clean things up in the living room while Jack takes the kitchen, music from his country radio station wafting through the rooms, every other word half-obscured by static.

Gabriel will go to bed, just a little before midnight, and another day more in love.

—

The best days are ones where the sun is out, there’s no clouds in the sky and neither of them have to be on set.

Jack has a pair of sunglasses he made Gabriel buy him at the drugstore around the corner. His expensive, designer pair got broken in the car and he keeps saying he’ll replace them, but every time Gabriel’s seen him this summer, he’s wearing the pair that were eight bucks and plucked from a rack next to shelves of body lotion.

He wears them while he floats in the pool, covered in sunscreen and with a beer in one hand, the other skimming the surface of the water. Gabriel sits on the edge with his own collection of empty bottles and the power to change what song is playing.

Perched on the side of the pool with only his calves wet, he switches out tapes and tells Jack when the phone’s ringing.

“I think that’s probably Angela—want me to pick up?”

“Nah.” Jack dips a foot into the water, readjusts himself. “No point, nothing going on here to report.”

They’re top of the network ratings these days, both of them making more than enough to move out on their own. But this place has been home for just long enough that it's hard to broach the subject of giving it up.

Gabriel is thankful that Jack is a creature of habit in this instance. Sometimes it can be frustrating, but when it comes to this he’d hate to see Jack change.

There have been more than a few gossip rags that seem to have picked up on what he sees as his own hopeless pining. But that’s the weird sort of beauty of being on a soap. The average person isn't watching and, to the people who are, it’s just part of the all-encompassing drama of the plot, anyway.

“I’m gonna go get another drink,” he says, leaning back and pushing himself up from the ground. Jack grunts in response, looking for all the world like he might fall asleep at sea. It wouldn’t be the first time—Gabriel’s had to save his white ass from roasting in the sun more than once.

The kitchen is where Gabriel lets out the breath he’s always aware he’s holding. On days like these he just cannot get the space to breathe. He lets his hands rest against the countertop, palms down, and steadies himself.

He turns and stares at the fridge, at the cutout magazine covers that are fraying at the edges, the pictures from the cast trip to New Mexico, the alphabet soup magnets across the freezer that say _GET MORE AGNTS_.

The back door opens with its time-honored tradition of screeching and slamming back into the doorjamb, and Gabriel calls out, “Miss me already?” The kind of thing he says half-joking, always hoping it's the truth.

Jack has his sunglasses pushed up into his hair, squinting at the lighting change as he comes inside, still dripping wet.

“Stupid,” Gabriel says, “if you need a towel—”

“I don’t,” Jack cuts him off, and Gabriel furrows his brow, halfway to asking _then what is it_ when Jack strides across the kitchen from the backdoor to where Gabriel is standing and wraps a hand around his elbow, thumb in the crook.

“Jack.” Gabriel puts everything he can into that name, a warning not to start something he isn’t prepared for, an acknowledgement of the way this contact, skin-to-skin, is already enough to make him fall back against the island countertop. The fear that this isn’t the confrontation he wants it to be.

But Jack just shakes his head and closes the space between them, leaning in to press the shape of his mouth to Gabriel’s jaw.

“Yeah?” he says when Gabriel shudders in response, a full-body kind of motion. Something close to a dry sob.

“God, _órale_. Yes, you idiot.”

Shaky hand to Jack’s neck, thumb on his pulse, and breathing in the air between them. Gabriel tells himself that if he hesitates here, that’s forever. No point in wasting time.

He kisses Jack the way he’s always thought to, chaste and then chasing, mouth open as soon as Jack relents. Tastes like beer and pool water, he thinks to himself, like sunscreen and bug spray. His tongue on the inside of Jack’s mouth, taking what’s his.

All of Jack against him, like he’s wanted for he doesn’t know how long, it’s almost too much—but only _almost_.

Hand splayed against Jack’s shirtless lower back, he pulls little whimpers from Jack’s mouth with the cant of his hips and the press of lips to the pulse of Jack’s neck.

“How long?” he asks, not letting himself look at Jack’s face, keeping his words muffled against his jaw. His heart is beating like crazy, a juggernaut in his chest and Jack must feel it. He must know.

He must have always known.

“Dunno.” Jack is breathless above him, hands on Gabriel’s chest like the solidness of it is the only thing keeping him standing. “I didn’t keep track. But when you walked away from me just now...for some reason I thought, I can’t keep letting him do that _._ ”

Gabriel wheezes out half a laugh, stupid boy. Stupid small town boy.

“You could’ve stopped me any time.”

He pushes away from the counter and Jack stumbles backwards, kept upright only by Gabriel’s hands on him, crashing into the fridge. Magnets scatter to the floor and Jack’s cover of _Seventeen_ magazine flutters to the ground.

They kiss angrily now, and Gabriel doesn’t know who it's aimed at. Each other, themselves—both are probably true. For letting this thing grow between them, for not seeing it there. For refusing to look too close.

Jack hooks a leg around the back of Gabriel’s thigh and grinds his hips forward. Gabriel gasps out a breath and lets his forehead fall to Jack’s shoulder. The room they’re in is a hundred, thousand degrees, the hottest place on earth.

“Do you want this?” Jack asks, mouth against Gabriel’s ear. “Huh? You gotta tell me, Gabe—Gabriel. I need to hear it. Need you to say it.”

“What do you need me to say?” Gabriel lifts his head, hand under Jack’s chin, thumb to his bottom lip. “I can’t read your mind, babe.”

The flush across Jack’s skin is instant and he breathes out beautifully, eyes closed, eyelashes against his cheeks.

“So unfair,” he mutters. But he pushes forward and this time it’s Gabriel who stumbles backwards, out of the kitchen and into the living room, legs hitting the back of the couch. “I need you to tell me what you want to do to me, want to hear it in your voice.”

“You need me to tell you I want to fuck you?” As soon as the words are out, they both freeze for half a second, and Gabriel can hear the hum of the fridge, the click of Jack’s jaw as he swallows, the beat of his own heart. “Because, God. I want to.”

Jack takes a step back and Gabriel finds himself unable to breathe. If it was too much, if he said the wrong thing—

“My room,” Jack says, hoarsely, “’cause yours is a mess.”

Jack’s room reminds Gabriel of serving, bed made with corners tucked and bare walls, his clothes folded up nicely when you open the drawers. A cross on the wall with a prayer card tucked behind it and some book or another always on the bedside table.

“When do you even have time to read?” Gabriel asks numbly, because commenting on the hard length of Jack’s cock and the way it’s pressed up against the fabric of his trunks is too much.

“You know how you nap in between takes?” Jack’s hands are on Gabriel’s sides and he’s flushed pink all the way down his chest. “I use that time to be _productive_.”

Gabriel decides he wants to kiss him again and finds that he can—a novelty. He’s imagined doing this a hundred, thousand times, but it was always stolen away, barely reciprocated. He hadn’t guessed that Jack would be so tactile and forceful, that he would push Gabriel back onto his bed and climb on top of him with hair still wet from the pool, his sunglasses now carefully placed on the bedside table.

It’s a different thing in action, just a little bit awkward and very tentative all around. Gabriel isn’t sure if he should put his hands on Jack’s arms, if he should cant his hips upwards, or if he should get a taste of his skin while laying back on his sheets. He knows how to do all these things, but he isn’t sure how it works here, with this specific person.

He’s thinking, _If I push any further, will this all fall apart?_

There’s a fragility to their movement now that they're in a bedroom, both of them acting like the other is made of glass and liable to crack open at any second, like they weren’t both made for this, made for the two of them together on top of freshly washed, crisp white sheets.

Gabriel isn’t at all surprised that he likes the way it feels when Jack runs his hands down his chest and the flat plane of his stomach. He’s thought about it enough, about the possibility of it, and the reality exceeds his expectations. Jack’s touch is nervous until it isn’t, until he’s licking a stripe up the side of Gabriel’s neck and grinning at the sound that causes, wickedly.

“That’s not fair,” Gabriel says, face still sun warm and Jack above him like some kind of perfect thing sent from on high. His mind is running with ridiculous thoughts, ridiculous things to say, all of it half-remembered from the romance novels his mother squirreled away throughout their house, that he’d read in corners and crevices, in the bathroom with the door closed.

And Jack is looking at him like—God, like he’s never seen anything as beautiful.

“You’re not fair,” is what he says, voice desperate and hoarse. “Looking the way you do, every day, all the time. Right in front of me and what am I supposed to do about it, huh?”

Gabriel pulls him down again, kisses him and loves it. The action is nothing revolutionary, nothing he hasn’t done in half a dozen clubs all down the curve of the coast, nothing he hasn’t done on a hotel bed or against an apartment wall. But it’s with Jack and that makes all the difference, air between them like electricity, every touch like the shock of a live wire.

“One time,” Jack says, as Gabriel bites at his jaw, grips at his hips, “I was in here thinking about you. Middle of the night, _fuck_. I-I almost, I almost went to your room to wake you up, wanted to tell you what was going through my mind.”

“Haven’t you figured it out by now?” Gabriel cradles the back of his head and presses his body up, their chests flush together. “You wouldn’t have had to wake me up. I was thinking about you, too. Every time.”

Jack breathes out something so heavy Gabriel knows it can only be what he’s been holding inside since that night. It sounds like how relief feels.

They kiss while the sun goes down, Jack’s room burning orange when he finally lets Gabriel up so he can stand at the side of the bed and roll the waist of his swim trunks down.

“Jesus,” Jack says, watching him, eyes half-lidded and biting at his bottom lip.

“Nothing you haven’t seen before,” Gabriel says, heart thudding, trying to sound normal. His cock is half-hard against thigh as he kicks the trunks to the side. And, sure, he and Jack have undressed together between scenes and around the house, but it’s always been rushed, covert, and undeniably unsexy.

Here, Gabriel has Jack staring openly, opening his mouth as if to say something and then making a sound in the back of his throat that makes Gabriel think _oh_ , that’s what it sounds like. That’s what it sounds like when the realization hits you in waves, that this is actually happening.

From there, everything moves fast. He helps Jack get his own swim trunks off, blue and white, Hawaiian flower print, and Gabriel just wants to be with him, on top of him, touching him. He feels a little like he’s orchestrating it all, having Jack lay back on his pillows and straddling his lap.

“Is this good?” he asks, terrified that it’s not, that he’s thrusting them forward at a speed Jack isn’t ready for.

“No,” Jack says, but he’s smiling, showing just enough teeth to remind Gabriel he needs to lick at them next time they kiss. “But only because you aren’t touching me.”

Gabriel leans over him and reaches down, knowing neither of them are going to last.

“Stay with me,” he says, “all the way through.”

His hand around both of their cocks, he brings them together, hisses at the contact and licks his lips as he feels himself shiver. Jack’s eyes are shut now and his mouth is open, but he’s quiet, not making a sound.

That changes when Gabriel starts to move his hips, rocking into his own grasp, and saying tightly, “Come on, baby, just like I said.  _With_ me.”

For all of Jack’s bravado, for all that he was the one to reach out first, when he looks at Gabriel it’s clear he’s scared and unsure, terrified he’s going to do the wrong thing. “I don’t, God, I don’t wanna mess up, Gabe—Gabriel.”

“No, shh. No, you’re not gonna.” Gabriel slows, presses a kiss to his temple and could almost cry for how Jack doesn’t seem to understand. They’re both sweating, breathing hard, delirious with something that fills the entire room. “You couldn’t ever. Not with me.”

“Yeah?” Jack says, looking at him so plainly it’s _painful_. “Yeah, then—can you show me? ‘Cause I don’t...God, I don’t know what to do. Not really.”

Gabriel is no stranger to starting over. He rolls over onto his back, grinning at Jack’s wide eyes, the suddenness of the movement.

“Come here,” he says, “I’ll show you exactly what to do.”

—

One day Gabriel steps into the house and feels like everything’s been moved an inch to the left. It’s the same beat-up couch in the living room, the same mattress on his bed frame, and the same stack of VHS tapes that are, for some reason, stored next to the toaster. But it’s all slightly different, all shifted so imperceptibly that noticing makes him feel crazy.

He tells Jack when they fall asleep together after a shared shower and Jack grins against the skin of his neck.

“I’ve noticed it, too,” he says, and he’s like a dog, pressing his nose against Gabriel’s face in search of affection. “Everything was in the wrong places before, but now it’s all aligned.”

Gabriel is on top of the world and, therefore, in no position to disagree.

They win a daytime Emmy in the meanwhile, all of the cast up on stage together and Gabriel and Jack kiss Ana on the cheek at the same time, something she throws her shoes at them for later, expensive velvet pumps that hurt more than they rightly should.

That leads to a long night of drinking that in turn leads to everyone ending up back at their place and Gabriel is too drunk to remember why they’re even celebrating.

“Best ensemble cast!” Reinhardt reminds him with a positively bruising clap to the back and a guffawing laugh.

Lena, who holds her liquor surprisingly well for her size, chimes in, “Best coworkers in the business, I’d say.”

There’s a gradual shift to the backyard as the night goes on, and Gabriel ends up stoking a bonfire with the aid of Ana, the two of them warming up and not really talking, making useless observations about the unseasonably cold weather and the difficulty of taking care of a pool.

Gabriel’s left hosting duty to Jack, who’s playing the part admirably, moving between the kitchen and the patio and hiding the expensive beer under the sink. Whenever he manages to make his way over to the bonfire Gabriel shoos him away, too conscious of how easily they fall together these days.

He’s tempted by the way Jack looks tonight, still wearing his white button up, the sleeves rolled halfway up his forearms. Gabriel’s stylist had assured him a white suit jacket would accentuate his skin tone and be a popular choice, but all he’d achieved was the appearance of a snowy owl that had wandered into a flock of penguins.

“We match now, though,” Jack is saying, standing arm-to-arm with Gabriel and elbowing him, the casual intimacy of it enough to make Gabriel half-smile. “Hell, we look like we’re going to a wedding.”

There’s a snap and a flash and Gabriel is only able to hear Ana cackling before his eyes clear of white spots and he sees Angela looking apologetic.

“Sorry, sorry,” she says, waving a Polaroid camera in the air. “Lena wants pictures and there was a bet made in the living room that we couldn’t get one of you two together. It came out quite well, if I do say so myself.”

“You could have just asked,” Gabriel grumbles, even though he knows he would have said no, and that it wouldn’t have come out nearly as good if they’d been forced into it.

It’s Jack who makes the decision to kick everyone else out just after one in the morning, shooing them into cars, thankful for the concept of a designated driver for once. With just Ana remaining Gabriel feels relaxed for the first time that night. He doesn’t even bristle when Jack rubs at the small of his back in her presence.

They continue like that as spring bleeds into summer once more and Gabriel discovers what it means to really, truly only have eyes for one person.

He spends days on set remembering filthy things Jack did in bed and becomes enamored with the small details of their interactions, the way their words flow in a way that can’t possibly make sense to anyone but them. He worries stupidly over Jack when they’re separated by miles, but enjoys the feeling of being reunited too much to give up temporarily parting.

It’s the kind of thing that feels like it could go on forever, their shared home trapped in whatever it is you call a snowglobe with no snow to speak of. Maybe something like: a place of their own.

It’s not like they don’t go out though, it’s just usually Jack’s idea.

Bars and clubs downtown, populated by cigarette smoke and bad music, and Gabriel has enough money these days to buy stuff that isn’t on the menu. There’s always girls around and Gabriel doesn’t hate their company, letting them ply him for extra drinks and getting into full fledged debates about the name of the kid they added on _The Brady Bunch_ in the later seasons.

Half the reason he does it is because Jack gets unreasonably jealous, forcing him on his knees when they get home or sometimes even in the bathroom if there’s a lock on the door.

“You’re reckless,” he says once, Gabriel licking at the inside of his thighs and the rim of a sink at his back. They can hear the pounding bass of the music in the background, and Gabriel just grins.

“And you _love_ it.”

What’s fun and daring early on starts adding to the wear and tear of the whole thing as they wrap up filming on their current season and begin the long stretch of off-time that always awaits them.

Jack has a movie lined up that fall and is eager to get away even though it’s a second rate rom com that has him starring opposite a woman he has no chemistry with.

“It’s not my fault I’m never gonna have chemistry with anyone besides you,” Jack says in one of his softer moments, on the drive to the airport. He’s filming in Chicago and New York and will be gone for two and a half months, which seems like both an eternity and a saving grace.

Before now they’ve been away from each other for weeks at a time—this is bigger, the kind of thing you either survive or you don’t.

Gabriel says, “At least you know how to kiss someone now,” and almost swerves into the next lane from how hard Jack hits his bicep.

The house feels empty when he returns and he ends up filling it with buckets of paint and ladders, tarps and tape. He spends a couple weeks redoing every room in the house, moving furniture, becoming friends with the guy at the home improvement store, and bringing paint samples home.

He realizes, after two weeks, that he doesn’t really have any friends.

Ana is somehow in the midst of a whirlwind romance and it never occurred to Gabriel to actually become close with the rest of the cast, though he guesses he’s getting there with a couple of the newer guys who he’s been sharing a lot of scenes with recently.

He knows Jack would say to invite them over, so he does, albeit awkwardly.

“I have a pool,” is the line that works both times, and it results in Jesse McCree showing up in swim trunks and flip flops ten minutes earlier than he said he would.

“This is awesome, Reyes,” he says, nodding to himself and surveying the house, which is still a mess of half-filled cans of paint and spattered blue tarps. “Love the color you picked out for the kitchen, what’s it called?”

“Beige?” Gabriel asks, disbelievingly.

“Yeah! I think my whole apartment is beige.”

Jesse ends up cannonballing into the deep end, throwing his hair back and laughing when Genji shows up, already half-baked and fully clothed, with no obvious intention of joining anyone in the water. Gabriel secretly thinks Genji Shimada is going to be moving onto bigger and better things much faster than just about anyone else on the show, but he also thinks he needs to lose the green hair dye.

“Nah, that’s his _style_ ,” Jesse says from where he’s trying, in vain, to keep a beach ball completely submerged.

“Is it your style?” Gabriel asks, looking to Genji who stares impassively at him from behind a pair of framed sunglasses.

“It is,” he confirms, which Gabriel supposes ends that argument.

He ends up making stuff on the grill, hamburgers and hot dogs, the spread reminding him of being seven years old and smelling permanently like chlorine. By the time it’s getting dark outside Genji has cracked a few wry smiles his direction and Jesse is relaxed with a beer in hand and a face-cracking big grin.

“We should do this more,” he says, kicking at Gabriel’s leg and raising his eyebrows. “You seem lonely here.”

“Probably because Jack’s not here,” Gabriel admits, which gets Jesse sitting up straight. “He’s filming that movie and all—”

Jesse’s waving his hand dismissively. “Nah, I know about _that_ , just didn’t know you lived together.”

“How?” Genji looks amused, wrapped up in his hoodie and scrunching his nose. “It’s not like it’s a secret. They leave in the same car. You can’t possibly be that dense, can you?”

“Kids,” Gabriel says sternly, which makes Jesse snort and Genji roll his eyes to the side, despite the upturn of his lips. The conversation shifts easily after that, Jesse claiming he has horseback riding experience out of nowhere and Genji laughing at the very idea, all of them getting loud enough in the aftermath that one of the neighbors comes over to the fence to ask them to quiet down.

Genji leaves first, citing an early morning run he likes to take and once he’s gone Jesse gets strangely quiet. Gabriel’s thought, for a while now, that Jesse’s whole carefree attitude is more than a little put on, something that he does for the sake of entertaining people he likes. It’s not a malicious or harmful thing, just a mask he wears when it suits him.

Gabriel can’t say he doesn’t relate.

“So you and Jack,” Jesse says after a couple minutes, voice low, “how’s that work?”

“Are you asking who fucks who?” Gabriel says, and Jesse sputters, face flaring red. “‘Cause the answer to that is it depends.”

“Christ, _no_ , I’m not. I just—it’s sweet is all. You two.”

“Sweet?” Gabriel has never applied the word to what he and Jack have, except maybe in his abstract thinking about the taste of the other man’s skin.

“Yeah, like, keepin’ it under wraps and all,” Jesse explains, his cheeks still tinted red, “even if it sucks. I mean, you shouldn’t have to, but. This is coming across all wrong, sorry.”

“No, I get you. It is what it is, and it’s good to be with someone who’s happy with what we have.”

Gabriel watches Jesse take that in and then takes it in himself, doesn’t stop thinking about it as he lets Jesse crash on his couch, as he finishes up painting and rearranging the furniture, and as he drives to the airport to pick Jack up two months later.

It’s a relief when Jack falls into the passenger’s seat like he never left, complaining about being starving and placated when Gabriel says he’s got ground beef and vegetables at home and they can make nachos.

“Missed this,” Jack says in the newly-beige kitchen, a change he had only momentarily balked at, “missed you.”

They kiss against countertops and outside at the pool, in bed and on the well-worn couch, everywhere they can think of.

The arguments start when the holidays roll around and Gabriel doesn’t think much of them at first. Jack thinks it would be nice if Gabriel came to meet some of his family, but Gabriel’s got standing weeklong plans with his own brood, and he’ll never hear the end of it if he misses even a part of the festivities.

It barely seems worth mentioning to anyone else until he’s on the phone one evening and Ana’s saying, “You know, you should really go and meet his parents, Gabe.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“Well, you should! It means a lot to him!”

“I’m aware,” Gabriel says, wanting to add _that’s why I’m not going_ , but keeping that part to himself because he can see Jack out on the couch, groaning at the current state of the Colts game. He takes the precaution of hiding behind the open door of the fridge. “It would mean a lot to me too, if I knew I wasn't going to be introduced as his best friend."

“I can understand that, but it's a step in the right direction. You'd charm them to the point that they'd never be able to object when he tells them the truth.”

“I am _not_ charming.”

“You certainly try not to be.”

He doesn’t end up going with Jack and things are tense straight through the New Year, up to and including a heated discussion when they’re at a party, something Gabriel thinks they’re hiding well until they get asked by a bartender if they want to head to the coat room.

“Great, well, that’s going to be on a front cover somewhere,” Jack says when they’re in the car, leather gloves creaking around the steering wheel in a way that annoys Gabriel more than it usually would. Lately he’s been nitpicking what he considers Jack’s useless displays of wealth, and the gloves are up there.

Gabriel huffs out a sound of disbelief. “No one was taking pictures of us, Jack. You really need to check your ego.”

“Yeah, me, I need to do that. Not the guy who tried to argue with the bartender over the year of the scotch.”

“It was—they were lying! I’m not paying for sketchy liquor, if I wanted to do that I would have stayed in South Central like my cousins.”

“Sometimes I really wish you could hear yourself,” Jack says as he pulls into the driveway of their place and cuts the engine.

They continue into the foyer, bickering through hanging up jackets and kicking off shoes, brushing their teeth and pulling on sweatpants, until the two of them fall in bed on top of each other, exhausted by it all.

Gabriel’s got his ear to Jack’s chest, listening to the cadence of his breathing, in and out.

“What are we doing?” he says after a long, drawn out moment, lifting his head to look up.

Jack’s already asleep, eyelashes fluttering, unable to answer.

—

It’s two weeks later when Gabriel comes home to Jack’s stuff in boxes, stacked high around the house. The rug from the living room is rolled up, still useful despite the wine stain on the corner. Cabinets are blown open, half empty now, the remaining soup cans and boxes of oatmeal looking dejected.

Six pack of beer on the kitchen counter and that’s untouched, left where it was set down when Gabriel came in.

“I went to see my family for the weekend and you’re moving out?” he says for what feels like the millionth time. The words still don’t make sense, are shaped all wrong and don’t fit together. He feels like someone’s dumped out two puzzles in front of him and he’s trying to sort all the pieces into a picture that makes sense.

“I mean, yes and no.” Jack is still moving stray glasses and other fragile items into boxes, wrapping them all individually in newspaper.

It makes Gabriel want to grab something and break it, but he doesn’t. That’s one of those things he’s not supposed to do anymore. One of those things he doesn’t _want_ to do anymore.

“Doesn’t seem like ‘yes and no’ to me, seems pretty clear.” Gabriel can’t even look Jack in the eye.

“I just think—”

“ _Estoy hasta la madre_ , leave then, at least you’re making a decision.”

Jack is dumbstruck at that and Gabriel is too, but it’s only what he’s been thinking for months now finally made manifest. It had been a strange, stretched relief to see his family, his aunts filling his plate every time he turned around and his younger cousins begging stories and snuck beers off of him. Open appreciation, unburdened by any huge secret aside from the question that kept coming up: _Are you seeing anyone?_

To the whole family, he was their wayward, untethered son. He knew that, who he was, for a whole weekend.

Here, he doesn’t know—who he is, what he is, to Jack.

He can’t do this anymore.

When Jack has left (closing the door behind him and leaving promises to come back for the remaining boxes in his stead) he revels in the silence, the freedom of a place that he can finally call his own.

It lasts for all of half an hour, at which point he turns from the fridge to ask if takeout sounds like a good idea, and everything falls apart. The perfectly crafted house of cards they’d built together, the one that had once seemed infallible, collapses in on itself at the slightest breeze.

Or, told more simply: Jack moves out and Gabriel follows shortly after, and nothing is quite the same after that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so...hey!
> 
> i have this fic mostly completed, so the wait time for the next two parts shouldn't be too bad, as they just have to be edited and uploaded. a couple notes on some choices i made for this fic real quick, though: mccree and genji are much closer in age to gabe here just 'cause it works better for the timeline, i am not from la and have never been so inaccuracies as far as that goes are on me, and i wish gabe spoke spanish in canon so i forced him to do so here, at gunpoint. again, any inaccuracies regarding his spanish are on me and i am open to corrections.
> 
> comments are always appreciated, and feel free to say hi on [twitter](https://twitter.com/koromarus) as well! see you next time!


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jack tastes like he always has, feels like he always has, smells like he always has. Just a little bit older, just a little more time between them. And what’s that between old friends?

Ten years in, they get the news that they’re cancelled. Gabriel is on vacation, well earned by any estimation, so it takes a while for word to get to him.

He ends up accepting a collect call in his hotel room on a balmy afternoon, shoulders dripping water from the pool, sunglasses and a half-empty can of beer in his hand. “Yeah, no, yeah, I’m not shocked, just,” he sucks in air through his teeth, “I guess I wasn’t expecting it so soon.” He puts his beer down and sits on the edge of the bed.

“I think they decided we weren’t worth the risk anymore,” Ana says, voice crackling from the other side of the border. He can see her in his mind eye, dressed smartly and standing in her spacious kitchen, not a mess in sight. “Bigger and better things and all that.”

“Than us?” Gabriel knows his bravado is unearned at this point. They’re barely breaking a one point in the ratings these days and the only reason anyone followed him to his hotel last week was because he’s in Baja, where he still has a decent base of people interested in his comings and goings.

“We’re in our mid-thirties! You and Jack should count yourselves lucky, you’ll still get offers. I’m sure they’ve considered hiring someone to put me out of my misery. Bullet between the eyes from a sniper I can't even see.”

“Ana,” he says in a low tone of voice. He hates to hear her say things like that, even as a joke.

“You’re so sensitive Gabe, lighten up!” Her laugh is as bright as the sun that’s glaring in his eyes from the balcony. He flops back on the bed so he’s staring at the ceiling instead. “I’ll be more than okay, I just know the odds.”

“Mm.”

He doesn’t know what he was thinking, coming here alone. It feels stupid in retrospect, this is news they were waiting for, a possibility that was hanging in the air. And now he’d have to drive three hours on the 5 before he’d even have a chance to see a familiar face.

“How’s Jack taking it?” he asks, finally, because he knows she wants to give him a report.

“He’s in denial. Said he’s going to talk to someone. I said, ‘Who, Jack?’ He said, ‘Someone high up.’ What does he even have for leverage? Like anyone gives a shit about that daytime Emmy.”

“He keeps it on top of the fridge.”

“When he lived with you, yeah. It’s in a case now at his place in Studio City. From far away you’d think he has a kid who was most improved in little league. If you’re ever allowed over you can see it for yourself and we can talk about how stupid it looks while he's in the wine cellar.”

Gabriel laughs and rubs a hand over his eyes. He feels like he could take a nap now, when earlier he was looking at a whole day in front of him, ripe with opportunities. “Yeah,” he says, “one day we can all do that. Just get together, look back at everything, and laugh.”

“Sure,” Ana says, with a surprising amount of conviction in her voice, “one day.”

They end the call after a couple more minutes of trading barbs and Gabriel finds himself unable to tear his eyes away from the ceiling.

He can’t seem to get up and face the sun, so he doesn’t.

—

At first they all speak here and there, discussing the elusive rumors of another network buying the show. It’s enough to give them all a topic of conversation, a reason to pick up the phone or swing by someone’s place uninvited. _Hey did you hear_ —?

Jack has some sort of conspiracy theory at a party in the Hills that they all end up at by contrived circumstance, Ana pulling them together on an oceanside deck lit by tea lights and smirking over the lip of her mixed drink, something that smells sweet and looks like the color of a sunrise.

“They were going to write us three out anyway,” Jack asserts, leaning back against the beach wood wraparound, waves in the background. Everyone’s living in places like these now and Gabriel’s not even sure who’s house they’re at—some up and coming starlet’s maybe. The music, soulless synthpop by all accounts, seems to indicate as much.

“Were they?” Gabriel swills the remaining liquid in his bottle of Tecate and gets a warning look from Ana, who’s not yet drunk enough to miss the sarcastic tone in his voice.

Jack, who’s been drunk for roughly a year straight now, says, “Yes, yeah, they _were_. My agent said—”

“You fired your agent,” Gabriel reminds him.

“I did! _Because_ he said he had a feeling this was going to happen sooner than later.”

“I thought it was because he let the deal for that sitcom fall through?” Ana’s interest is piqued now, because she’s obviously heard a different story than Gabe has.

“Well, I mean, it was a...it was a lot of things. But, hey Ana, if you’re going to the bar could you get me another?”

Ana rolls her eyes to the side, catches Gabriel’s gaze and inclines her head slightly, a message they’ve had to send increasingly over the years, as Jack turned to brown bottles and started stumbling through his personal life on his own.

_Take care of him, would you?_

It comes naturally to Gabriel, that.

Leading Jack down off the deck and towards the beach, kicking through sand until they can sit a few feet from the water and listen to the crash of waves. It’s an old trick Gabriel learned when he’d visit his mother’s family. No one can hear you this close to the ocean.

“We’re getting old,” Jack says, like Gabriel hasn’t noticed. “I was gonna, I don’t know, hit on one of the girls up there and then I realized that I was…”

“Ancient?” Gabriel gets an elbow to the ribs for that and for a second it’s almost like old times, the two of them sitting this close.

“Doesn’t matter,” Jack admits after a couple minutes of silence. “Stuff like that never goes anywhere for me.”

Gabriel’s hands are in the sand and Jack is leaning against him and he can hear the words that aren’t being said. His heart feels wrecked, capsized, washed ashore, something giant and abandoned. A vessel that’s never to be used again, at least not for its intended purpose.

There are so many things he wants to say, words that almost make it past his lips, but he pushes it all down in favor of letting Jack kiss him.

His mouth is a traitor to his mind, because he knows he shouldn’t be doing this, but instead he’s letting it happen. Welcoming it, even.

Because Jack tastes like he always has, feels like he always has, smells like he always has. Just a little bit older, just a little more time between them. And what’s that between old friends?

Jack kisses him deeply, like things never ended, pushes him back on the sand in the moonlight with a party above them and the sound of the ocean is in Gabriel’s ear like he’s holding a seashell up to it. An imagined sound.

Jack’s voice in his ear, saying, “God, I missed this.”

Gabriel grinding up against Jack’s ass and gasping for air, not caring if someone sees and not caring if Jack cares—if Jack _would_ care if he was sober, if Gabriel would care if he was.

None of it seems to matter with the heat of their skin and the touch of Jack’s hand on his throat.

“Come for me baby,” Jack says, in that way that only he can, “just like old times.”

Gabriel gasps out a name with his eyes on the yawning night sky, and he can never say who’s it was. Only that, once again, he did what Jack told him to and it didn’t change a damn thing.

—

It’s around the time that Jack goes to rehab, when Gabriel realizes they aren’t even friends anymore.

He finds out about it through a magazine at the gas station and an ensuing call to Ana when he gets home, because at first he thinks this can’t be true. Jack would have reached out to him, asked him to come get rid of all the alcohol in his house. They’ve done it twice before, great big black garbage bags in their hands and crushed cans everywhere, Jack apologizing in the car for not talking to him sooner.

“He didn’t want me to know?” Gabriel says, not sure why he’s so surprised. They haven’t had any long lasting contact in months, it’s just—the important stuff, he thought they were still each other’s first call when it came down to it.

“Gabe,” Ana sounds like she’s talking to her daughter, patient but exhausted, “he didn’t even mention you.”

Gabriel feels like he might be sick and the only way he knows how to deal with a situation like this is to tear everything apart. Entire rooms, his whole house, every stupid thing that doesn’t actually matter.

He stops himself before it gets out of hand, just a glassware set and the decorative stuff on the mantle in his living room down for the count. There’s glass to sweep up and he’s going to have to eat on napkins tonight but it hardly matters.

He’s seeing a girl he doesn’t really like, who he doesn’t think really likes him either, so he calls her up and breaks it off.

“It’s not you, really, I just—there’s someone else—”

“Yeah,” she interrupts him, like he’s slow on the uptake. “I got that.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, because he is.

She hangs up on him and he slams the phone down, once, twice, again and again until the plastic cracks and shards go skittering across the kitchen counter.

He’s tried to do everything right ever since he came home to find Jack surrounded by boxes, unable to look him in the eyes. He’s dated other people and decorated his house tastefully, saw a therapist for a while and wrote in a journal, called his mother on her birthday and bought one of his cousins a house for her and her new husband. He’s attended premieres in a black suit, smiling for the cameras and giving interviews, even as the offers have dried up over the years.

And it's gotten him here, shattered things strewn around him, with no one to help him pick up the mess.

An apartment in one of the neighborhoods he used to bike through and dream about as a kid, but he forgot to find someone to share it all with.

—

He never goes to rehab himself, but he manages to get himself together in the same way he learned to clean as a kid, by putting all the ugly stuff behind closed doors and under the bed.

He saddles up, fires his balding, out of touch agent and finds himself a new one, starts taking jobs he used to turn his nose up at (most lucratively, a coffee commercial in Japan), and starts the painstaking process of learning to use a computer because apparently people are posting breakdowns on the internet now.

New headshots, new video reel, and a photoshoot from Brazilian _Vogue_ falls into his lap—sort of.

His new agent’s name is Amélie and she doesn’t let him think that stuff like this is just happenstance, the way his old agent did.

“That was his mistake,” she tells him bluntly when he points this out. “One of them, anyway. He should have told you how difficult it was getting to inspire any interest in your name long before he did.”

“Is there some kind of catch with this, then?”

“Oh no. Central and South America still find you alluring.”

“That’s good news. Right?”

“Yes, Gabriel, that’s good news. On a separate note,” she continues briskly, “you will need to be shirtless in some of the pictures.”

“Of course I will.”

Gabriel does the photoshoot with minimal complaining, chatting with the woman, a smartly dressed and sharp witted journalist who introduces herself as Satya, writing the article accompanying the shoot which is, so far, mainly about how he’s thankful that he’s kept up with his gym schedule these past few years. Like he really had a choice.

“Do you keep in touch with your _Watch Over Me_ castmates?” she asks, once she’s found him suitably relaxed by her puff piece questions. She’s been recording their conversation the whole time, but it’s only now, he notices, that she takes out a pen and small leatherbound notebook to take substantial notes.

Gabriel’s getting the lapel of a woolen charcoal suit jacket smoothed out by one of the photography assistants, white fuzz picked off the front of the cashmere black turtleneck underneath. He’s trying to convince himself he looks decent and not desperate, that the rings on his fingers don’t make him look like a gaudy, self-obsessed mob boss.

“Sure,” he says, “yeah. Last time we got together—when was it? Well, Ana’s husband owns that restaurant in Newport Beach and she got him to shut it down for a night so it could just be a group of us.”

“Sounds intimate,” she says, not bothering to inject any warmth into the words herself. “Should I take that to mean that in the half-decade since the show wrapped you’ve met with maybe half of your former castmates all of one time?”

Despite himself, Gabriel rather likes her, even if he’s unsure as to why such a sharp-eyed, fast thinking woman is writing sidenote articles on washed up celebrities for a Brazilian fashion magazine.

“You sound like you want to know more about the situation,” he says, “so what the hell, I’ll bite. Yeah, it wasn’t exactly a friends for life kind of thing for me, with a few exceptions.”

“Ana Amari,” she offers.

“Sure, Ana.” They don't talk as much as he'd like. She and Gabriel catch up every few months, and she sends him cards for holidays that contain wallet sized photos of her daughter smiling wide, missing her two front teeth. “Jesse, too, he’s always texting me about something or another.”

“And Jack Morrison?” The silver of her pen catches in one of the backlights and blinds him momentarily. “Do you stay in touch with him?”

“No, he. He and I…”

“Drifted apart?”

Gabriel swallows and resists the urge to fix his hair or shift in his seat. “Everyone knows we were close,” he manages to say after a moment, “there’s no use pretending we weren’t.”

“How close?” She levels him with a gaze that pierces him straight through.

“Very. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say I loved him.” The words fall out of his mouth like water might, nothing holding them back, no form to keep them in place. They spill into the room and stay there. “But, no, I don’t stay in touch with Jack anymore.”

He changes into his own clothes numbly when the shoot is over and walks to his car in silence. There’s a breathing exercise he’s supposed to do when he’s upset and even though it never feels like it works he follows the steps as he sits in his front seat and lets it lead him to the next logical conclusion: calling his agent.

“I might have outed myself,” he blurts as soon as she picks up.

“‘Might have’—how is this something you’re unsure about?” He can hear the sharp click of her heels in the background and the steady, measured nature of the sound calms him.

He tells her what happened, leaning back in his seat and rolling down his window once he’s said everything he doesn’t want anyone else to hear. It’s sweltering and he just needs to breathe.

“It’s not even myself I’m worried about,” he admits and it's half-true. He can't focus on the panic he feels about what this might mean for him, it's too much right now. “I just don’t know what Jack wants people to know about us. It’s been so long and he always hated the rumors, the unfairness of it all. It’d be one thing if I meant to say it, if I knew he was okay with it, but I didn’t and I don’t.”

“Hmm, alright, one step at a time. I’ll make some calls.” Gabriel thinks he recognizes the _ding_ of an elevator. “But I do have good news.”

“Oh?” Slouching in his seat in hundred degree weather, Gabriel doubts anything can cut through the fog of the disappointment he feels trapped in, the weight of it choking him.

“There’s a script being floated, a big action film. Car chases and gun fights. And they want you for the lead.”

Gabriel sits up straight, pulse racing. “The lead? They—”

“Wrote the part with you in mind,” she confirms, and he can _hear_ the slight, smug smile on her face. “Just wait until you hear the offer.”

A month later he’s in an office drinking whiskey and using the word ‘career’ to describe where he wants his future to go for the first time in years, when he gets a call from Jack.

“Yeah?” he says, answering his phone as he closes the door of the office behind him, following directions that were quickly thrown his way by one of the execs. He’s hoping this doesn’t take long and not worried about that coming across in his tone of voice.

“Did you tell a Brazilian magazine you’re in love with me?”

“What? No. Well, maybe.”

“Gabe.”

“It’s hard to remember, the interview was a while ago,” Gabe says, voice low as he makes a left and finds the door to an empty mid-sized conference room unlocked. “Read it to me.”

“‘When asked about his former long time roommate and on-screen blood brother, Reyes looks subdued for the first time during our interview. He seems hesitant to admit they’ve drifted apart, and reminisces on what he clearly thinks of as better days, when there was affection and even love between the two.’”

“She didn’t include the direct quote?” Gabriel hisses, closing the door behind him. He's suddenly angry that this article made him sound like little more than a weepy sap who’s been forgotten by his much more successful co-star. He drops into the chair at the head of the long table that stretches towards the other end of the room. “Jesus, okay, trust me. It could have been a lot worse.”

“What did you _tell_ her?”

Gabriel can’t help but imagine how Jack must look right now, ruggedly handsome and upset, probably with a beer close by. It sounds like he’s inside and for some reason that makes Gabriel think he’s in his kitchen, aimlessly looking for something to eat like he always used to on off days in between meals.

“That I loved you,” Gabriel says, and his throat is tight with the combination of the words and the idea of Jack without him in a house somewhere that isn’t theirs. “Past tense. That’s all.”

“Okay, it’s—fine. I should probably...I want people to know, anyway, about me. So.”

“Yeah?” Gabriel can’t imagine. He’s always considered himself both lucky and not, when it comes to his sexuality. PR-wise, being bisexual is a double edged sword. He knows he wouldn’t be miserable with a wife, but there is a certain unescapable weight that comes along with hiding such a crucial part of who he is, regardless.

It leaves him feeling like he’ll never really win.

“I mean, it wasn’t just you, even when it was.” Jack sounds like Gabriel feels, half-crazed and without anyone else to really talk about this to. “It was always men, as a whole. You were just...so much brighter than the rest.”

Without thinking Gabriel says, “Shut up.”

Jack is silent.

“Don’t, just...don’t say stuff like that to me, after all this time. After leaving like you did.”

“It was ten years ago,” Jack says, in a voice that tells Gabriel he’s trying to sound more sure of this fact than he is. For both of them it may as well have been yesterday.

“If it had been a clean break, I’d give you that, but it wasn’t. You _wounded_ me, took a part of me and left. I came home and expected to come back to you, trusted that you’d be there. And you weren’t, and that’s fine. The decision you made was fine. But the way you did it, Jack, that wasn’t okay.”

It’s a rush of things he’s wanted to say for years and he feels a pang of regret that it’s happening like this, over the phone, without him even actually knowing where Jack is or what he’s doing. He’d always imagined it would be an in-person kind of thing and that maybe it would be healing.

Instead he just feels vaguely sick and is staring at the wood grain of a table he’s never sat at before today.

“Look, Gabe, there’s a lot—I think about you, you know?”

“You’d have to. I’m the best you ever got.”

“Let’s not do this right now.” Gabe hears the clink of a glass so, okay, it’s liquor then, not beer. He knows he’s being judgmental, jumping to conclusions, but the rising urge to chastise Jack for day drinking is like the impulse to scratch an itch until it bleeds.

“When would you prefer, Jack? Because we see each other so often. How about this, we can get together, I can blow you, and you can pretend it doesn’t mean anything by getting drunk by yourself afterwards. I seem to remember that working for you in the past.”

Jack’s inward take of breath is audible even over the phone. “Funny how you’re gonna pretend I’m the one who hasn’t changed, when you’re just doing what you always do, lashing out because you’re scared.”

“This isn’t me scared. This is me pissed off, and I have every right to be.”

“Like I _don’t_?” Jack rarely raises his voice and, like always, the sound of it shocks Gabriel into momentary silence. “I wanted to keep talking, I wanted to stay friends. I messed up, I realize that. I didn't know what to do with everything between us and I handled it in the worst way possible. But by the time I realized that and wanted to apologize, you had shut me out. You did that, not me. So you know what, Gabe? Stay miserable and convinced you were in love with me.”

“I was. I _was_ in love with you,” Gabriel says, voice raw and shaking from both anger and the well of pain in his chest. It's deeper than he remembered.

“You were in love with a second in time,” Jack says, each word so pointed Gabriel almost winces from the pain. “You wanted to stay in a rental house forever, sneaking into separate rooms and driving to work together, recycling the same shit over and over again. Fuck me for wanting more, I guess, and for having the audacity to know I wasn't ready for that yet.”

There’s silence ringing in Gabriel’s ears and all he can think to say is, “I have to get back to a meeting.”

Jack scoffs, but Gabe thinks it sounds watery and forced and while his words are biting, his tone is tired. “Of course you do. It was _great_ catching up with you.”

“We’ll have to do it again sometime.”

After the call ends, Gabriel rubs a hand over his mouth and tries twice to do one of the mindfulness activities that usually works for him before standing up and pacing. He makes it back to his meeting, claiming a minor family emergency that’s now been dealt with.

He asks for another pour of whiskey and every drop burns on the way down.

—

It takes Gabriel time to get used to tabloids caring about him again.

When he was in his twenties he relished the headlines that came out, pictures of him and Ana walking out of a coffee place together would be tacked up in his dressing room. She’d hit him on the back of the head whenever she saw, but she’d snicker too, at the very idea.

He found it less funny when _In Touch_ devoted six pages to pictures of him and Jack in their own backyard, summer days by the pool. That’s around the time his skin had started to crawl whenever he left his house.

Now, he swore he’d never say this, but he’s too old for this shit. On the cusp of pushing into his early forties and having to read headlines that refer to his recent box office success by snappy names. _Reyes’ Resurgence. Risen from the dead and on top once again_.

Pictures of him working out, running seaside, stopping to answer his cell phone.

Olivia thinks that last one is hilarious. It sends her into peels of laughter on set when Gabriel shows it to her.

“Who is this magical person who gets you to answer the phone, Gabe?” She has to wipe away her tears with the edge of a napkin, careful not to mess up her stage makeup. “ _Te lo juro_ , you’ve never accepted one of my calls.”

Gabriel snorts, but when he thinks about it he knows that the only person it could have been was Amélie.

She’s the only person who calls him on a regular basis, and the only one he bothers to talk to when she does. She’s also, ironically, the only one happy about this whole situation. Though ‘happy,’ for her, is an overstatement.

“It’s good that the gossip magazines care about you again,” she tells him when he calls her later that night, making dinner in his apartment. “As long as they have nothing sordid to report, it’s a win-win situation. And we don’t get many of those.”

“I fail to see it as a win for me when it involves someone invading my privacy.” Gabriel stares, unseeing, into his fridge. Stocked full of things he doesn’t want to eat, meals he doesn’t want to make. He misses the days when he ate the same dinner for weeks at a time, not minding the taste, soaking in the company.

He used to have walls with water damage and pictures tacked up, but now everything’s stainless steel and impossibly clean. His mother passed away six months ago and he knows she’d hate it, this heartless room in the middle of his apartment. A picture of her is the only thing on the front of the fridge and, not for the first time, he considers moving her to another room. One she'd like better.

“What are you worried they’ll catch you doing?” Amélie is all business, as usual. He imagines her as a robot in her own right, plugging herself in like a cell phone to recharge at night. “Because if there _is_ something, you need to tell me. And then you need to stop doing whatever that is.”

“Christ. It’s not that–it’s the principal of the thing.”

“Principals aren’t something we have the luxury to consider. For you, it’s good to look boring. In fact, make that your goal. Be as boring as possible in everything you do.”

“ _Chale_. I won’t change anything I’m doing, in that case. Call me if anything comes up.”

He ends the call before Amélie can reply and groans in frustration, the sound echoing off the empty corners of the room. She has a point and he’s well aware of that, but it doesn’t mean he has to like it.

Scrolling through his contacts, he tries to find someone to call, someone he can complain about all this to. _Isn’t it fucked up_ , he wants to say, _that I’m supposed to see these people following me around as good for my career?_ But no one seems inviting. The friends he has now, if he can call them that, will all tell him it’s just part of the job and then move on to another subject. And the friends he used to have, he hasn’t contacted in so long it would ridiculous to try now.

His eyes burn from exhaustion and he drops his phone to the counter with a clatter, clenches his fists a couple times and tries to remember what that therapist he had right after Jack left taught him about moments like these. Something like _just breathe_ and _focus on something good in your life_.

Isn’t that a fucking joke.

He barely realizes he’s doing it. One second he’s grabbing for the nearest thing and the next he’s looking down at glass shards from a broken wine glass, stem still intact and rolling across the floor.

He leaves the mess to be cleaned up in the morning, too sick to his stomach with himself to face it tonight, and he dreams of a capsized ship at sea, the tumultuous waves pulling him under and bringing him face to face with a peace he’s never known.

He wakes up to twenty-seven missed calls and an amount of texts that he didn’t think was possible.

Most of the numbers are unknown, not in his contact list, and that makes his heart drop. There’s only one person it feels safe to call back right now.

“Gabriel,” Ana says, “are you still living over by Grand Hope? It would be best if we talked in person.”

“Yeah—did something—is everyone okay?”

“Oh, yes. It’s nothing bad. But Jack did an interview. I’ll be over in...mm, twenty minutes.”

She’s wary when he opens the door and dressed in a billowy top and sensible shoes, looking classy but exhausted. He’s glad she doesn’t hug him, something he’s been dreading for years because it seemed inevitable when they finally saw each other again, but she does squeeze his bicep and smile in a way that makes him feel at ease.

He leads her into the kitchen and she nearly steps on glass.

“Sorry, I forgot I dropped that,” Gabriel says hurriedly, going to find the broom and dustpan he’s sure he must own. “Last night I was just, I don’t know. Must have had too much to drink.”

“You don’t have to apologize to me.” Ana is glancing around his kitchen and laying her bag down on the counter. Gabriel is scared she’s going to offer to make something for him, he really doubts she ever took those cooking classes they tried to steer her towards.

“Still.”

Once they’ve settled down at the island in the middle of his kitchen Ana fixes him with the hard gaze of her eyes.

“There’s a video,” she says. "Do you want to watch it?”

“Not particularly. Just—what happened?”

“He did an interview on one of the LA morning shows. He came out.”

Gabriel can’t stop himself from getting up and walking around to the other side of the island, suddenly filled with nervous energy at where this is going. This is one of those things he’s been waiting for, sitting on for almost a year now. Ever since Jack told Gabe himself that he wanted to be out, publicly.

“Okay, well. That’s good. Good for him.”

Ana is looking at him expectantly. “I’m just wondering how you’re feeling.”

“Well, Ana, I knew about it already. I mean, I think we all knew, but I probably did more than anyone else on account of us fucking.”

“Is that what it was?”

“As opposed to, what? A summer romance? A love affair?” Gabriel can feel himself getting mean, his voice harsh and accusing.

“I always considered it a relationship.” Ana says it so simply that it makes something in Gabriel bend at the knees and he suddenly feels cowed in the way only Ana can manage. “I didn’t realize it was just fucking to you. It was more than that to Jack.”

There’s a piece of Gabriel that has always ached to know how other people saw them together, a piece of him that wanted to believe the way that he and Jack felt for one another was so unavoidable, so obvious, anyone would have been able to put a name to it.

And then there was the other part of him that couldn’t bear for that to be the case, because he knew Jack would have been destroyed.

“Look—the interview isn’t why I came over,” she says, shaking her hair back over her shoulders. “The video's online. They asked him about you, and you should watch it yourself.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Because he called me before he went on air, just barely fighting off a panic attack.”

“Jesus.” Gabriel pinches at the bridge of his nose and tries not to ask if he’s okay. Tries to tell himself that Jack’s always okay, after a while.

“He kept bouncing back and forth between being sure you were going to hate him and being sure you already did. I told him you wouldn’t and that you didn’t.”

“Thanks for making a promise I’m not sure I can keep.”

Ana rolls her eyes to the side, something Gabriel remembers her doing often on set when she was given a direction she didn’t agree with. Her voice is even and measured as she says, “Gabe, I’m not telling you what to do. But I would appreciate if you attempted to remember what you meant to each other once and then tried to do a fraction of what you would have done for him back then.”

She puts a hand on his shoulder and they stand there like some kind of stained glass work of art, Gabriel well aware he doesn’t deserve her forgiveness and Ana giving it anyway.

He finds useless things to do for the rest of the afternoon after she leaves, drifting from room to room and cleaning out boxes in closets, finding things he forgot he owned.

He pulls out his laptop only once it’s getting dark outside and it doesn’t take long at all for him to find a three minute clip from the morning show Jack was on, embedded into an article titled _SOAP OPERA HEARTTHROB COMES OUT: JACK MORRISON IS GAY_.

“Way to bury the lede,” Gabriel mutters to himself before pressing play.

It’s a hard video to watch, mainly because Gabriel knows Jack well enough to be able to see through the bright smile and warm tone of voice. He’s blinking a lot, not looking the host in the eyes, and his voice is shaking when he says, “I wanted to be able to tell people, for people to find it out from me. That I’m gay, and proud of that.”

Gabriel pushes the laptop away when they ask about him, bringing up their friendship, the closeness, the speculation.

“That was a very important time in my life, and he was—he _is_ an important person to me. He always will be,” Jack says on the computer screen. He’s dressed in his PR best, a deceptively expensive white sweater with the sleeves pushed up his forearms, dark wash jeans and black boots. Gabriel feels sick with the thought that they could have been sitting next to each other, doing this together.

The host goes on to ask some inane and frankly offensive question about whether or not Jack is considering doing any Broadway and Gabriel finds himself scrolling through his phone, finding Jack’s number in a buried text thread. It’s just a couple of cursory messages from a year and a half ago when Jack claimed he was trying to get some of the old cast together for some kind of speaking tour.

Gabriel’s last text was a clipped, “ _I’ll pass thanks_ ,” that makes him cringe now.

There’s a glass of wine in between him locating the number and finally making a call, and he’s pouring himself another when Jack answers.

“Gabe?” he says, voice raw and ragged, and Gabriel can only just imagine how many interviews and statement requests he’s dodged today. It’s maybe a miracle he answered, maybe not.

“Yeah.” Gabriel feels a dull pain in his chest, knowing Jack still has his number saved, just sitting there. Gabriel’s always been good at getting rid of things, fast and messy and leaving scars, but Jack—he keeps the numbers of people he hasn’t talked to regularly in as many years, and he answers when they call.

“You saw?” Jack isn’t really asking, doesn’t really need to hear the answer—he already knows. Gabriel wonders if he’s still wearing that white sweater.

“Yeah,” Gabriel says again. “Would it be okay if I came over?”

“That’s not a good idea,” Jack says, but he doesn’t say no, and Gabriel ends up making the drive, taking the long way past the Hollywood Bowl, a feeling caught between anticipation and dread that sticks in his throat and is reflected back at him by the angry red brake lights all up and down the 101.

If it weren’t for the gated neighborhood and location, Jack’s house would look relatively normal from the street, and Gabriel tells him as much as they head out to the patio where a table and chairs waits for them, everything looking desperate for some kind of social event to take place.

“Fuck,” he says, taking the beer Jack hands him and popping the tab, “who’s dick did you suck to get a backyard around here?”

He immediately wants to take it back, but Jack grins at him, his smile familiar and boyish. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

It’s a nice backyard, with a pool and manicured lawn and little strung across lanterns swaying in the light breeze of the evening. It seems like a backyard you’d want if you had kids. Jack just has a Maltese named Hero who showed a passing interest in Gabriel’s shoes and then fell asleep at Jack’s feet.

“How about this,” Gabriel says, setting his can down, “there’s a park on the goddamn roof of my building.”

“Yeah I heard that’s where we are as a species. Putting parks on roofs.” Jack hasn’t even touched his beer, but he’s relaxing back into his chair with a comfortable ease that makes Gabriel want to cry with relief. He _is_ wearing a sweater, but it’s navy blue. Makes his eyes pop. “You spend much time up there?”

“Nah, I don’t have the time with everything going on.”

“Mhm. Big movie star. No time for pedestrian activities.”

“Ah, _ni modo_ ,” Gabriel waves at him dismissively, but can’t help being pleased. “I’m still getting used to being busy again. You’re the one who’s been regularly working all this time.”

“Sure, sure. I never aspired to be in a crime procedural, but…”

“It aspired to you.”

A couple hours later sees them with a handful of empty beer cans and more than a few old stories shared, and it’s closing in on midnight when Gabriel is finally pushed against a wall, Jack’s thigh between his legs and his breath smelling like alcohol.

“Neither of us are gonna be able to get it up,” he reminds Jack, even as he grinds down against his leg, feeling for half a second like he’s twenty-three again. It doesn’t last, though, there’s too many lights on and the decor is a sort of muted, rustic look. Jack’s hair is halfway to grey and Gabriel knows his knees will hurt if they try to do this here.

“I don’t care,” Jack replies, his hands on Gabriel’s chest and his gaze insistent. “It’s not about—I just need someone to be close to right now, and no one else makes me feel like you do.”

“You can’t say that to me,” Gabriel says, eyes falling closed, making no effort to move away, “not after all and everything.”

“But it’s true, it’s fucking true. It always will be.”

Down the hallway and up the stairs, towards whatever bedroom Jack's leading them too, a fumbling mess between the both of them. They leave a trail in their wake, like a particularly violent storm that's yet to be given a name and refuses to deviate from its path. Once there Jack does the rounds, tips a couple of framed pictures forward before pushing Gabriel towards the bed.

“What was that?” Gabriel asks, suddenly aware of little details he didn’t notice before. The twin black lacquer dressers against the wall across from him and the nightstands behind him, both of them with a book on top. Jack’s, he would guess, is a non-fiction history type of thing full of black and white pictures and forgotten events.

He doesn’t feel up to guessing what the other one is.

“Does it matter?” Jack’s down to his boxer briefs and socks, looking half-annoyed and half-angry, like Gabriel’s the one who’s already in a relationship, not him.

The ugly thing is, it doesn’t. Jack might be living with someone, some other guy who makes dinner for him and feeds the dog, but Jack still said it downstairs, he still said _no one else_ and Gabriel lets him kiss him like he means it.

Back on the bed, halfway dressed and halfway hard, Gabriel’s fingers slick with lube and he says, “I take it this is a regular thing for you?”

“Not as regular as I’d like,” Jack replies, and Gabriel feels bad but he smiles because of course. Of course no one else can do for Jack what he did, what he does. Whoever this other guy is, whatever history they have, Gabriel’s the one Jack’s thinking of every single time. He can taste it on Jack’s skin, the full-body _need_ of it all.

“How bad do you want it?” he asks and Jack groans, somehow managing to look annoyed even with half-lidded eyes. His body is slightly pudgier than Gabriel remembers and that’s just endearing, a reminder that his current role requires little in the way of shirtless scenes and Gabriel desperately wants to discuss how he feels about that with him afterwards.

Somehow, that seems possible.

“Really bad, Gabe? Jesus, I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“Just how bad—how bad you want me inside you.”

Jack is beneath him, still loves a pillow under his head, and he looks to the side, towards the other book. “I just _want_ it,” he says, fingernails against the skin of Gabriel’s arm, “and I know you’ll give me what I want. You always do. So can you just get on with it?”

Gabriel feels a little like he’s been punched and Jack seems to see that, pulling him into another kiss and saying, “Sorry, no,” against his lips. “Sorry. I mean it. I’ve missed you and I’ve been thinking about this all week, since the interview got set up.”

“Yeah?” Gabriel croaks, a sob welling up in his chest. He feels sober already, although that can’t be possible. Jack is just so clear and solid in his eyes, so real.

“Yes.” Jack kisses him again, quick and chaste, but sweet. The kind of kiss Gabriel knows he’s had a thousand times from this one person and no one else. “Now, come on. Show me what I’ve been missing.”

And Gabriel does, making Jack moan for just his fingers at first, feeling centered when he sees the flush rise on Jack’s face, the familiarity of it all instantly rushing back to him.

Jack says his name breathily, pressing his lips to Gabriel’s cheek as he pushes inside, the two of them on top of a plush, white comforter and surrounded by reminders that this room isn’t theirs, that Gabriel is the wrong half of the whole that Jack's made for himself here.

Gabriel forces that thought out of his mind and concentrates on the feeling of Jack around him, on the smell of his body wash, the mole under the right side of his chin. The feeling is mutual—no one else makes Gabriel feels this way, either. Like he could spend the rest of his life here, like he’d find his own book to read and frames for pictures of the two of them. Like he’d settle down and iron out the wrinkles in his life.

Underneath him, Jack is taking him in, each slide home like something out of a dream and Gabriel pulls out and slams back in again, delirious from the high he gets hearing Jack whine so prettily at the feeling of it all.

“How is it?” he asks, because he needs to know, his hands on Jack’s hips and Jack’s legs around his back.

“Yeah, God, it’s good,” Jack says, opening his eyes. “Just stay like that, f-for a sec?”

So Gabriel does, so deep inside Jack that he feels like he might die, and it’s a moment he holds onto afterwards. The two of them together like they haven’t been for so long, both of them knowing it’s only temporary. He ruins the sheets and the comforter and kisses Jack again and again because he can, chasing after the distant idea of a life together, just the two of them and a pair of matching bedside tables.

The next morning, the ride home is silent, though Gabriel tries to turn on the radio a few times, wrestling with the dial while sitting at red lights, the backs of his arms glued to the leather of his seat by sweat. None of the music that’s playing feels appropriate, even the crooning Latin ballad he gets stuck on for half a minute.

So, silence and no clouds in the sky, sun beating down on his shoulders through open windows and air thick like molasses and half as sweet.

Polite wave to the guy at the door, elevator ride with a woman in jogging gear and a walkman on her waist, fumbling with his keys once he’s on his floor.

Inside, he takes his shoes off at the door and collapses on the couch. He thinks about the view of the night sky from a backyard and what it felt like to fall asleep with someone who he’s never forgotten the smell of. Who’s room still has a cross on the wall, with a prayer card tucked behind.

Gabriel takes out his phone and moves through his contacts, down, down, down. _Jack_. No need for a last name.

It’s the easiest thing in the world. Three presses of a button, select, scroll down, delete.

He throws his phone to the side and gets up, heads to the kitchen.

He needs a goddamn drink.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and that takes us through 2007 for anyone keeping track. please note: gabe absolutely stars in whatever this universe's version of _fast and the furious_ is, alongside sombra.
> 
> next chapter is the last one! if you're following along, let me know what you think, here or on [twitter](https://twitter.com/koromarus)!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> But that’s the thing with Jack, that’s always been the thing with him. Gabriel doesn’t need to explain. Jack just _knows_.

Gabriel checks out of the Rosewood Beijing early in the morning and takes a call from Jesse, who does a whole song and dance about the time difference between the two of them before getting to his point. Nothing is ever simple with him.

“Heard from Genji they’re actually going through with that reunion thing,” he says after fifteen minutes of trivial back and forth, doing a terrible job of trying to sound casual.

“Yeah, I just got the invite from my ex-husband.”

“Your—oh. You mean Jack. Well, what are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking it’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard, and that I’m probably going to end up doing it anyway.” Gabriel is on the hunt for a coffee place and he’s not picky, he just wants a cup of something dark, but he’s not having much luck. There are more clothing stores here than there are places to get food. “Honestly, Jack had to of been desperate to get me to join. He didn’t exactly stop on his way to work to see me.”

“Not surprising.” Jesse sounds vaguely removed, like he’s put Gabriel on speaker phone and is also speaking into a pillow. Hard to know if that’s the case or if it’s the fault of international roaming, which is never exactly stellar. “Genji said they’re hard up to get the original cast, he thinks they eventually want to float an entire reboot.”

“Jesus. Great, yeah, just what I need.”

In lieu of a coffee place, Gabriel stumbles upon on a duty-free shop and pays out the ass for bottled water and a granola bar, settling down in his boarding area while he listens to Jesse spout off possibilities for future storylines, a little more into it than he has any right to be.

“I told Genji maybe he could come back as, like, part-robot and have a robot friend.” Jesse’s been trying to slip robots into every project he’s worked on since he played one on an HBO show a couple years ago and became a regular on the con circuit. Gabriel doesn’t really get it, but he’s not sure he’s supposed to.

“Why—okay, look. If _he’s_ part-robot, why do we need a whole other robot character? That doesn’t even track.”

“It was just an idea.” Jesse goes quiet for a minute and Gabriel has a gut-twisting moment of realization, one he has far too often recently, that someone is trying to help him and he’s not doing a great job of appreciating the gesture.

It’s something he used to do without feeling guilty.

“Jesse,” he says, leaning forward in his chair and rubbing a hand over his mouth, “thanks.”

Jesse lets out a bark of surprised laughter. “Sure, uh, no problem. I just think they should consider it, is all.”

“Mhm, I’ll pass it along.”

“Get home safe, okay?”

The flight home isn’t anything special despite the length, though Gabriel finds himself inordinately happy that he says no to the flight attendant when asked if he wants any alcohol, and the grilled salmon he orders is surprisingly filling. He’s roused by the announcement that they’ll be landing and, as always, struggles to believe that he’s arrived in LA four hours earlier than he left Beijing.

The time difference rattles around his skull, a live thing, as he waits for an Uber to pick him up and turns his cell service back on.

He’s inundated with text messages from too many people and he scrolls through them with varying degrees of amusement, only caring to respond to a handful. Amélie is reminding him to tweet about the premiere, which he refuses to do, and Olivia is asking if he wants to adopt a cat she found in someone else’s backyard—request complete with pictures of a skinny, golden eyed stray.

 _Can’t you do it?_ he asks Amélie, and _No, cute though,_ he tells Olivia, although he’s sorely tempted to say yes to her. He hasn’t had a pet in he can’t remember how long.

His driver is a bored looking person with a nose ring and dreads, and they blessedly don’t try to make any conversation during the trip to Gabriel’s house, though they do whistle when they pull into the neighborhood.

“Didn’t wanna say anything, but I love the movies,” they say when they’re unloading Gabriel’s suitcases in the driveway. “Kinda though it wasn’t you at first, but y’know, guess everyone has to get home from the airport.”

Gabriel ends up signing the back of their phone case and he tips well, rates five stars, and calls Amélie while he’s unlocking his front door.

“Some kid is probably going to tweet about being my Uber driver,” he says, “we took a selfie together.”

“Gabriel,” she says, sounding exhausted, “I really should learn to trust your ability to create viral social media campaigns out of thin air at this point.”

“One could even go so far as to wonder what I’m paying you for, anyway.”

“Oh, could they?”

She fills him in on the press he has lined up, a couple of phone interviews and an event downtown, some cast stuff for YouTube which is something he’s still getting used to. He opens his fridge and stares inside, zoning out for a good moment while she rattles off calls she’s gotten for endorsement offers.

“No infomercials,” he says, grabbing a juice carton and shutting the door, downing a gulp without a glass. “No infomercials or late night stuff, you know that. But the sunglasses one, you can call them back and get more info. I’m interested. Also, I feel like I should tell you, I ran into Jack at the premiere.”

“Jack _Morrison_?” He can hear the eyebrow raise in her tone of voice, implied by the emphasis on the last name. She’s not really asking if it was him, because of course it was. She’s upset because she already knows he did more than exchange pleasantries.

“The very same. He says the old cast is getting back together for some kind of reunion. And, you know, I’d heard some sketchy rumors someone was looking into that, but nothing concrete. So...that didn’t come over your desk?”

She’s quiet for a long minute, except for the shuffling of papers on the other end of the line. Gabriel waits patiently, wandering from the kitchen into the living room. By the time she speaks again, words careful and measured, he’s picked up the remote and started cycling through channels.

“It’s possible that it did, and that I assumed you would want nothing to do with it. Largely because you have said, more than once, you would rather be murdered in cold blood than participate in anything revolving around your time on the show.”

Gabriel stops on the Weather Channel, calmed by the steady movement of a heatwave over the Midwest.

“Fair enough,” he says. “I would have just appreciated a head’s up, is all. As it is, I agreed to do it.”

She says something in rapid-fire French, spitting syllables out like punches. The only word he recognizes is a particularly harsh _poutain_ which doesn’t strike him as a positive sentiment, all things considered.

“Jesus, it’s not signed and sealed, okay? Just a verbal agreement.”

“I would say I’ve gotten to know you well over the years, wouldn’t you?”

There’s a tropical storm moving into the gulf and Gabriel watches it hit land, red and orange and yellow on the screen, a swirling mess.

“Sure. Yeah.”

“Then allow me to say this: any agreement _you_ make with Jack Morrison is as good as contractual. I know you, Gabe. You’ve done well to avoid him, but it’s dulled you to the realities of your relationship with him. To say he’s a weakness is putting it lightly.”

“It’s a reunion show, not a fucking—I didn’t agree to _marry_ the guy,” Gabriel says, throwing the remote to the side and rubbing at his eyes.

“And if he asked?”

“Are you my agent or an auntie from church, Amélie? Because I don’t employ you to ask questions about my personal life like this. You’re really—I mean this—you’re _really_ pushing it.”

“I have been helping you walk a thin line for a long time now,” she says, and he’s fairly certain she’s moved rooms. He can picture her standing, back straight and face stony, alone in some nondescript office space. “It is absolutely my business if you’re going to jeopardize the career I’ve helped you to rebuild.”

“Oh just fucking say it. It would be bad for business if I was openly bisexual. The rumors are fine, but any more than that’s a liability. Just—at least be honest.”

“I don’t want to say that,” she says, and his anger wilts in the face of her voice, which sounds apologetic, a rarity. “You know I don’t. But I’m also well aware of the perception of the two of you together and the reality of your tendency to act stupidly when he’s involved.”

“I appreciate the honesty, but I haven’t been fucked up over him for a while now. It isn’t 2005 anymore, or 1995 for that matter. Give me some space to breathe.”

To her credit, she does. She has some calls to make and lets him go without a hassle, for tonight at least.

Gabriel settles back on the couch and turns his attention back to the path of the storm, to something happening somewhere else, and unlocks his phone in a fit of impulsivity.

 _So_ , he texts Olivia, _about that cat._

—

Days roll into weeks and before Gabriel knows it, he’s meeting half the cast in the VIP room of a bar that didn’t exist the last time any of them talked.

Falling into conversation with Ana is easy as ever, though she’s clearly not happy with him and he has to bite his tongue to keep from commenting on her choice to embrace the early greying of her hair.

“You look nice,” he says, in what he hopes is a congenial tone, kissing the air next to her cheek. “Does this mean you really use that skin cream you hawk on those commercials?”

“Gabriel,” she says, with a smile as big as it is fake, “I see you still haven’t learned the art of small talk. A shame, because you’re so handsome when you don’t say anything.”

They order drinks and ignore Jack who’s across the room and chatting with Lena and her wife animatedly in a little corner that makes Gabriel want to childishly seethe, all of them happy and prosperous in their openness. There is a part of him that wants to walk over and say something cutting about the way Jack’s got his legs crossed, but no one over there has done anything to actually deserve his anger besides being comfortable with themselves in a way he isn’t.

Instead, he tries to moderate a conversation between Ana and Moira O’Deorain, who has joined them belatedly, her high cheekbones still perfectly suited for playing a no holds barred European heiress to an electronics empire. Or whatever the hell her role was back in the day. Gabriel tends to forget who had what plotline, at this point.

“I’m only considering signing on. Some of us do have other pursuits to follow,” Moira is saying, which is a weird, sticky barb to throw at Ana, who’s more employed than anyone else in the room, even if she just wrapped on a series a couple months ago.

“That _is_ true,” Ana replies and Gabriel starts looking for a server, beckoning a freckle faced boy who can barely be twenty-one over to them. “I’m sure the audiobook profession is thankful for your dedication to the craft.”

“Oh look, champagne!” Gabriel says, bodily pulling the server into their circle and grabbing a flute off his tray. “We should toast, to—”

“Moira’s burgeoning podcasting career,” Ana declares, snatching up a glass and raising it high.

“To a sense of self-worth not derived from the chastisement of others,” Moira adds, her placid smile never leaving her face.

“To getting the fuck out of here,” Gabriel decides on, speaking just loud enough to cover a laugh from the other side of the room.

The night drags on and Gabriel feels he does admirably well holding things together. He even accepts Jesse’s arm around his shoulder once he’s arrived and barely grimaces when he gets introduced to the woman he’s dating.

It would feel like some kind of hypocrisy, to ask her if she knows her boyfriend is in love with someone else.

Instead, he gets Jesse to join him on the outdoor balcony, a space barely bigger than a postcard, the two of them brushing arms as they lean against the railing and look out at the lights of not-so-distant buildings, hills dotted with houses built of glass and metal, the sun sinking into the jagged horizon of their odd, modern angles.

“What are you doing?” Gabriel asks, head swimming, because he thought they were past this.

“It’s PR, look—we’re both aware, she _knows_. I’m not conning her or whatever you’re imagining.” Jesse is pulling a cigarette from a well-worn pack, lighting it with ease. He’s lost weight since Gabriel last saw him. “In a couple months, once the movie’s out and we’re done with all the press, we’ll wind things down. Go our separate ways.”

“Jesus, the shit they come up with these days.”

“Better than your story. Pushing fifty with nothing to show for it. People talk, you know.”

There’s a slight tremor, the earth shaking beneath them, and Gabriel is so used to it he doesn’t even have to try and keep his balance as the building groans beneath them briefly. The whole city is built for regular shifts and breaks, the acceptance of the inevitable.

“At least when I was dating women I was, I don’t know, _capable_ of being attracted to them. This whole thing just seems unfair, is all,” Gabriel says, finding the words he was looking for as Jesse flicks ash off the end of his cigarette, not caring where it falls.

“Oh, come on.” Jesse turns, back to the world and leaning against the rails. “Has it ever actually been anyone but him, for you?”

It does feel a little like being split open, over and over again throughout the years, waiting for the big one. The quake coming from below that will finally break the world open beneath him, the giant maw of the earth opening to swallow him whole.

“I’m just saying,” Jesse continues, not looking him in the eye, “I know how it is. More than you realize. Jack was never gonna love a woman, whether he met you or not. But you—you’re never gonna love one because you’re only ever gonna love _him_.”

“Thanks, thank you for that, Jesse,” Gabriel manages to say, his voice hoarse and his words soaked in an emotion he can’t name. It tastes like the champagne he downed, expensive and empty.

Jesse shrugs, snuffing out the cigarette on the railing, keeping his gaze cast down. “You’re the one who wanted to talk about what’s fair.”

Gabriel takes his leave, heading inside and giving only Ana a cursory goodbye, feeling wounded by the naked concern he sees in her eyes, by the knowledge that she can still tell when he’s hurting after all these years, just by the look on his face.

He tells her he’ll call her later, unsure if he actually means it, and makes it to the front of the building before someone grabs at his arm, catching him just above the elbow.

“Leaving already?”

It’s Jack, of course, because it’s always Jack, always has been, for as long as Gabriel can remember.

He looks tired in the dim lighting of the club, less triumphant than he did upstairs, and Gabriel is caught by the urge to ask him something he’s been wondering for a while now.

Instead he says, “Yeah. I have this thing. Tomorrow morning. You know how it is.”

“Sure. We’re all busy, but.” Jack’s hand is still on him, the heat of his skin a searing reminder of the way they used to fit together. The way they still do, even now. “You’ll be back? I’m—they’re really hoping you’ll be on board.”

“Yeah, Jack,” Gabriel says, hoping he doesn’t sound as wrecked as he feels. “Yeah, I’ll be back.”

Jack smiles in a way that reaches his eyes, in a way that makes everything around them feel like a split level with grey siding, a detached garage, and a postage stamp size backyard that's half concrete, half pool.

Gabriel makes his way home, unable to forget the phantom smell of chlorine and equally unable to escape the fact that Jesse, for once in his life, was right.

—

The truth is, Gabriel has little to do after a busy month of press and premiers, with shooting on his next film not taking place until the spring. The winter months on his calendar are just endless rows of empty squares. In the space that he would usually use to take time for himself, laying on beaches in Baja and sleeping in late, he ends up falling into what feels like another version of his life.

He starts getting regular calls from Jack, from Ana and the others and it throws his center of balance off, especially as he watches the rest of them pick up where they left off, easy as anything.

For him it feels like floundering, like he’s a fish on the floor of a boat, looking up at the sky with dead eyes, not even knowing how to breathe.

“Yeah?” he says when he picks up his phone one morning. He’s been up since five, wandering around his place, and he let his phone ring three times before he picked up, just to make it seem like he had something better to do.

“Gabe—it’s me.” Jack’s voice hits him hard every single time. Not just the sound of it or the cadence of his words, but the casual existence of it in his life. “Are you busy today? Thought it would be good to meet up, go over some things.”

Gabriel wants to hang up when this happens, this cruel mockery of what his life could have been if things had been different. It’s starting to dull, but he doesn’t think it will ever be painless, not completely.

He meets Jack for an early lunch and they talk shop over omelettes and coffee, balled up napkins on empty plates by the time they’ve gotten down to the brass tacks of it all.

“Jesse had some, uh, _interesting_ ideas, plotwise,” Gabriel is saying, feeling comfortable sitting across from Jack in a way that makes his chest hurt. Late morning sun is coming through the window they’re seated by and Jack looks golden in the glow of it.

“Oh, yeah. He took some screenshots—is that what they’re called? Yeah. He took some screenshots of some ideas he typed up. I told him, Jesse, that’s about a season’s worth of storylines. We’ll be lucky to have ninety minutes!”

They laugh and Gabriel scratches his nails against the arm of his chair, needing to let go of the panic welling up in his throat at the thought that this could have been how they were all along, the whole way through. He can’t seem to escape the thought today, but he hasn’t put much effort into it. He’s sitting directly across from the cause. No one is forcing him to be here and that’s the worst part, somehow.

He had the choice to not be here, but he came anyway.

“Do you ever think—I mean, you probably do, but.” His shoulders are tense and he remembers, suddenly, what it was like to be twenty-three and so _sure_ that how he felt would last forever. That they’d have years together, endless time on and on, just for them. “Sometimes I think about what would’ve happened if things had been different.”

Jack is quiet, leaning back in his chair and turning his gaze to the window. They’re in a restaurant on the second floor of some building, elevated just that little bit above the rest of the city, everything moving faster outside than it is between the two of them.

And that was always the problem, for Gabriel. He was always chasing after the next day together, the next month and year, never mind the present, never mind the moment they were in. He wanted everything from the very beginning, and now here they are with spent years between them like an over-sharpened knife. Dangerous to the touch.

What kind of relationship was that, Gabriel wonders, that he’d run so far ahead and never even bothered to look back, to make sure they were on the same page. In his lowest moments, he thinks of it as a literal event. A hike up a mountain where he made it to the top and realized he left Jack behind, struggling with the first few steps of the climb.

“Sure,” Jack says, finally, voice steady in a way that tells Gabriel he isn’t at ease with the question, like he had to work to keep it that way. “Of course I do. I think, you know, maybe I could have been more honest, maybe you could have been more patient, and maybe I would have stayed with you. And maybe it would have lasted, but maybe it would have ended the way most relationships do. Us growing bored of each other, or frustrated and angry.”

“It might have,” Gabriel admits, old enough now to recognize that what they had wasn’t ever going to be perfect, that nothing ever is. “But sometimes I just think, _fuck_ , I would have liked the chance to find out.”

“Yeah,” Jack says, and Gabriel follows the upturn of his mouth to the clear blue of his eyes, a color not unlike the ocean, not unlike the sky. “Me too.”

—

They aren’t even close to filming anything, but Gabriel gets invited to a high rise party in some rented townhouse by the Bay, water lit up all the way to Oracle Stadium where the Giants are in the midst of a playoff game.

Gabriel isn’t a huge baseball guy, but he’d rather be there than here. Popcorn and cheap beer and the option to get up and leave at any time, he wants all of that. He’s just happy he wasn’t forced into a suit for this, though he certainly feels underdressed in his jeans among studio reps he’s never met before, all of them with unmoving smiles on their face.

“Big fan, big fan,” he keeps hearing when people shake his hand and he guesses it’s probably not a lie these days.

He stays close to the floor-to-ceiling windows, flirting with opening the door to the balcony that he knows is supposed to stay closed, and allows people to come to him. The only time he’s really excited by anyone moving his way is when it’s one of the servers passing trays. He doesn’t even let them explain what they’ve got for him, just maintains a steady stream of food and drink in his hands.

Not everyone is here, he notices, just him, Jack, and Ana, which means—well he isn’t exactly sure what it means.

Jack is their de facto negotiation leader, so it seems equally possible he said no one else was available for something like this and that they weren’t interested in anyone else attending.

For all his faults, Gabriel wishes Jesse was here, if only because they could play lookout for each other while either one of them got some air. They were always good at coordinating stories on set, a ready-to-go _He’s in the bathroom_ at the tip of their tongues at all times.

Even lacking that excuse, he navigates things better than he would have in the past, holding his own in conversations and saying what people want to hear. He has no idea if he’d be able to get Olivia interested in a guest starring role, but he lies through his teeth that she’s already expressed interest and a couple of women who he thinks are producers seem excited by the prospect.

Gabriel can’t remember anyone’s name, but it hardly seems to matter.

By the time the night is over he’s eaten more little crackers than he can count and he’s both starving and high on the feeling that the night went well despite his initial reservations, so he strong arms both Jack and Ana into walking with him to a diner tucked under a hotel a couple blocks away.

It’s not a hole in the wall, but it’s not fine dining either, and the waitress has wide eyes as she passes them their menus.

“Wh-whenever you’re ready,” she stammers, pen poised in shaking hand, and they go easy on her, don’t tease her about it, and order like they would anywhere else.

“Poor thing,” Ana says. “I bet this is her first shift and _we_ walk in.”

“She’ll get used to it,” Gabriel says, dismissively, but he takes extra care to thank her when she comes back with his bacon and eggs, not even bothering to get mad about his toast being slightly burnt.

It’s almost two in the morning so they all get breakfast and eat in-between a story Jack has about the dog he’s fostering, how she barks and growls whenever he turns the radio on.

“I still don’t understand the concept of fostering a dog.” Ana points across the table at Jack with her fork. “Don’t you end up liking the dog? I literally cannot imagine you giving a dog up.”

“It’s easier than I thought it would be,” Jack admits, and Gabriel is sitting across from him, their knees leaned against each other so that Ana has room to stretch her legs. “I get to see the family they end up with. I dunno. It feels nice to do something like that. Something that’s not about me.”

Gabriel asks for a refill on his coffee and lets himself drift, Jack and Ana’s voices fading into each other, and the whole scene feeling like something he dreamed once. Ana in velvet and Jack in green with a smile on his face. Grease stained plates strewn across the table as they talk towards the sunrise.

He chimes in here and there, mostly about how he doesn’t know how they film for television anymore, how he really doubts he’ll be able to sign on for any kind of episode order they get. Jack seems to have figured as much, but Ana is annoyed with him and she elbows him pointedly until she leaves, calling a car to take her back to her place, and letting them know she’ll talk to them soon.

“No more Irish coffee?” Gabriel asks when she’s gone, miming like he’s going to pull a flask out of his blazer. That had been classic Jack in the early 2000s, something or another always on his person just in case there wasn’t alcohol readily available.

“Nah,” Jack says, so casually Gabriel could cry. The smile on his face is small but sure. “Y’know, that started because it was really, _really_ fucking hard to be around you. After everything, I mean. I was in mid-breakdown for two seasons. Had to dull it somehow.”

It doesn’t feel like an accusation—just the truth of how things were, how they must have been.

“Figured as much, after a while,” Gabriel says, and he did, though it took longer for him to separate his own guilt from Jack’s responsibility. All of it used to be tied up in a knot, some years ago, and they’ve both paid the price for that.

“We fucked up, huh?” Jack’s rubbing at his chin and not looking Gabriel in the eyes.

Gabriel wants more coffee and an excuse to not talk, to put this off longer, but their waitress disappeared into the kitchen a while ago and he’s really got to stop pretending that saying ‘that’s in the past’ fixes anything.

“There was a conversation we should have had, after we kissed that first time, and it never happened. I didn’t want it to happen. I just wanted us to skip right to the good, easy part.”

“I didn’t want it to happen either, just for different reasons.” Jack looks somewhere between relieved and ashamed, and overall not that different from how he did thirty years ago. “I thought about it constantly, worked it up in my head so it was something it was never going to be. Everything I wanted, I refused to ask you for, and then I’d get mad at you for not delivering.”

“And I thought everything was alright, or at least fixable, right up until you left.” Gabriel can’t help but avoid Jack’s eyes as he says it, but it turns out to be the right move, because it means he’s watching as Jack turns his palm upwards and reaches out his hand.

Taking Jack’s hand in his own feels like something bigger than it should, more important than it might to anyone else. But Gabriel can feel the warmth in that touch and the realization that comes with it almost breaks him.

“We’ve never done this,” he says, throat tight. “We’ve never—through it all, through everything we did. We never did _this_.”

It’s hard to say what he means specifically, whether it’s the conversation, the openness, or Jack’s hand in his.

But that’s the thing with Jack, that’s always been the thing with him. Gabriel doesn’t need to explain. Jack just _knows_.

—

Ana invites herself along to his suit fitting before the Oscars, both of them regulated to middling seats and dreading the red carpet, pre-drinking a month in advance while Gabriel gets pins stuck in him by people more competent than him in the world of fabrics.

“I do appreciate the effort,” Ana is saying, looking vaguely like a regal vampire in a white and black pant suit and a glass of Cabernet Franc in her manicured hand. “It’s sad that the bar is so low, but I think you’ll stand out, in a good way.”

His suit is, perhaps appropriately, close in color to her drink of choice, the burgundy of it complementing his skintone. Or so he’s been told, anyway. He’s never appreciated standing in front of a mirror for long periods of time, but he’s gained weight since the fall and his old measurements are a thing of the past, so he doesn’t have much say in the matter.

“Thank you,” he says, turning so the apprentice he’s got working on him today can get at the back of the jacket without much trouble. “I think.”

“Well it’s not the _most_ daring choice, but I suspect Jack will show up in black and white like he always does—so, you know. In comparison, it’s bold.” She’s looking at him over her glass and smiling pleasantly. “There were pictures of you two on the internet.”

“Yes, I heard.” Amélie had been thrilled, Gabriel less so. He and Jack had been about a foot apart, exiting a restaurant together, having a discussion the contents of which he can’t remember. Nothing as exciting as the article had implied, that’s for sure.  “The reaction online was...stronger than I expected.”

“Hm, well. You’ll survive, the both of you. We did, if I recall.”

Gabriel jerks an elbow forward, trying to cover his mouth while laughing and gets a glare from the apprentice, a stern eyed woman with pins in her mouth. He apologizes quietly and ignores Ana’s eyeroll and smirk, saying, “Why didn’t we ever get together?”

“Oh, Gabriel,” she sighs, turning away from him. “You know why.”

He tips well before he leaves, both for the service and for the discrete nature of the location. He’s sure bigger scandals than his own have been discussed during fittings inside these walls, but it’s a relief that there isn’t anyone waiting for them outside when they leave and that’s more than enough for him.

For her part, Ana continues to poke fun at him during the drive back home, only stopping they’re through his front door and she begins to compliment him on the decor.

“Very gothic,” she says before they’ve even made it past the front room. “I feel like I have to ask if I can cross the threshold.”

“Hmm.” Gabriel mostly picked out the colors and let an interior designer do the rest, so the choices she made are still growing on him. He feels comfortable with dark woods and cherry reds more so than the contemporary white and greys he finds when he visits other people. He keeps his shades drawn, even at night.

Once in the kitchen, Ana runs her hands over the quartz countertops while Gabriel pours her another glass of wine alongside one for himself, and yells out something he suspects is a swear word in Arabic when Shadow pops up out of nowhere, looking for a hand to nuzzle.

“I didn’t know you were a father,” she says, holding her hand out for the cat to inspect.

Gabriel scoffs and sets her glass in front of her, picking Shadow up and quietly explaining to her that counters aren’t for cats. They’ve been over this.

“So,” Ana says once he’s straightened up, “ _are_ you seeing anyone?”

“Here and there,” he admits, leading them into the adjacent living room, turning on the gas fireplace and watching her as she immediately finds interest in the bookcases that surround it. “I’m not avoiding possible relationships, if that’s what you mean. I know there’s that whole theory right now. That I’m so fucked up over him I won’t let anyone else even touch me.”

“Well, it’s not an altogether wild conclusion to come to, if someone’s only going off of how you look at him,” Ana says, keeping her eyes on the spines of the books she’s perusing.

“It’s still wrong,” Gabriel says, although the actual question goes unasked and unanswered—is he  _in_ a relationship? Is he committed to anything aside from what could have been but isn’t? He contents himself with a seat in one of the dark brown, leather armchairs that he’s liked since he saw them being brought into the house, and doesn’t bother acting surprised when Shadow climbs up the side and then collapses on his lap. She likes when he pets behind her ears.

“What about you?”

“Oh, you know. Fareeha hates me and wishes I wasn’t her mother. But she’s seventeen, so.”

“Par for the course?”

Ana nods, though she looks less steely than she usually does, mouth set as she places her glass down on the coffee table that separates them before collapsing back on the bone white couch that he uses as a bed every other night.

Gabriel says nothing as Shadow abandons him to go see what the new person is doing, travelling up the couch and perching on the arm to smell Ana’s hair.

“It is difficult, though. I never expected my teenage daughter would be my best friend, but I hoped she might like me a little.”

“Christ, I’m glad I never had kids,” Gabriel says, leaning back in his chair and rubbing at his temples. “It’s difficult enough remembering to clean out the litter box sometimes.”

“Mm. Gabriel, hush. I’d appreciate some peace and quiet.”

He leaves her alone, letting her nap and only pausing to take a picture once Shadow has curled up on her chest, hesitating before sending it to Jack, his finger hovering above the send button for longer than he’d like to admit.

 _Wine drunk_ , he says, _glad Uber exists now._

Jack does something that sends him a message that he’s laughed at the picture, which alarms Gabriel mainly because he isn’t sure how that happened, and then replies, _Remember when she’d sleep in your room on the weekends?_

Gabriel doesn’t reply, but of course he remembers the days where his bedroom was a thing to be lent away, not used by himself. When he’d wake up to blonde hair tucked under his chin and a smile like the sun.

The thought of it is a particular kind of hurt, not so deep a cut as it might have been once. Instead, it's like he's pressed his fingers too hard into a bruise that's fading away. He winces and pulls away, but if someone were to ask what's wrong he wouldn't know how to answer them. He wouldn't even remember how he got the bruise in the first place.

He’ll get Ana up in a couple of hours, but for now he lets her sleep.

—

There's a night halfway through January where they’re just off the pier and wandering aimlessly, both of them weighed down by fajitas and one too many beers from the Mexican place they started off at, and Jack is struggling to remember some inconsequential detail in the story he’s telling.

“I think, and I could be wrong, but I  _think_ that we’d been waiting for our food for an hour and a half,” he’s saying, swaying between one edge of the sidewalk and the other. “And that’s when my mom said, well, Jack, his wouldn’t have happened if you came to visit us in Indiana _._ As if, you know, restaurants in Indiana are all run flawlessly!”

“Wow,” Gabriel says, not in the least surprised, because he’s almost sure he’s heard this story before. “When did that happen?”

“Hm, dunno. 1994?”

“Yeah. Makes sense.” Gabriel can’t keep the laugh out of his voice and pretty soon they’re both laughing and that’s when it occurs to him, that he’s enjoying himself.

He can’t say for sure when shooting on the reunion will begin at this point, only that he’s signed some papers and had drinks with people who are investing and has some interviews lined up in the near future. But the fact is that this confrontation, this revisiting of his past that he’d always assumed would be excruciating and unbearable—it’s nothing like that.

It’s brought him to a place where he’s reaching out for Jack’s arm to keep him from stumbling into traffic as they both double over in hysterics over something that isn’t even funny.

The best kind of Saturday night, and it’s happening to him in his mid-fifties, alongside a man with whom he has a shared history that could he could never put into words.

“Jack,” he asks as they stand on a corner and wait to cross, “did you ever...did you ever think it’d be like this?”

“What d’you mean?”

“You know—me and you. After everything. Did you ever think we’d end up back where we started, together like this?”

The traffic light changes and Jack says, simple as anything, “Of course I did. Me and you? Of course I knew it would all lead back to this.”

By the time Gabriel has absorbed his answer, Jack is halfway across the street and he has to run to catch up with him. His hands are shaking on the other side of the street, and although Jack has changed the subject and is rattling off a list of things he needs to pick up from the grocery store, Gabriel is only half paying attention.

All he can think of is two words.

 _Of course_ , he repeats to himself, _of course_.

—

This night has been a long time coming.

Gabriel walks Olivia down the carpet of some after party, her green dress trailing behind her as she whispers in his ear, “My worst nightmare is that people think we’re fucking, I hope you understand.”

Camera flashes are still a shock to his system all these years later, each one popping off after another and none of them giving him any time to recover. He finds Olivia’s insinuation ridiculous considering she’s half his age and plays his surrogate daughter, but he’s also worked in the industry long enough to know she’s not wrong and that people are going to talk.

“If anyone asks, I think our reactions will make it pretty clear that’s _not_ the case,” he says once they’re away from the ridiculous onslaught of photographers, ushered out for some younger, newer thing.

There’s press awaiting them down the line and sure enough, they do ask. It’s not planned, but he and Olivia look at each other and break into snickers at the idea of it, Olivia even grimacing when the pretty, blonde lady interviewing them says Gabriel is handsome for his age.

“I’m sure he appreciates the charity,” she says, and Gabriel watches as she writes her number on the interviewer’s hand, whisking them away with a wink towards someone who’s got ridiculously expensive water bottles on a platter to offer them.

“You’re a handful,” he says.

“It’s not the stone age anymore, _papi_ ,” she replies, tone mocking.

They’ve already gotten through the big night itself, embossed tickets and pretending to laugh at some jokes in between actually laughing at others. Gabriel had to cover a yawn with the knuckles of his hand more than once and was blinking himself awake by the end of it all.

Now he feels uncomfortably awake and aware of everyone around him as they follow the flow of people into the waiting building, a space rented out by some director or another—Gabriel isn’t even sure he was invited to this, but Olivia had rattled off the address with enough confidence for the both of them.

The inside of the building is nothing like the outside, what looks like a church is a gutted approximation of a dance club from the early 90s, everything painted black, with green lights flashing. No one’s onstage but Gabriel still groans in realization at the music already coming through the overhead speakers.

“Did you bring me to an EDM concert?” he asks, point blank.

“Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t, does it _matter_?”

Fifteen minutes later, and Gabriel knows she did. There’s some Brazilian DJ up on stage playing what Gabriel will acknowledge is technically good music—it just definitely isn’t for him, even with the open bar available as an option.

He thinks that, more than the music, it’s the crush of people around him, all of them much closer to Olivia’s age. She’s found someone to dance with, some girl with a sleek ponytail and darkly painted lips, just one degree away from her actual type, just one turn removed from the girl she actually wants to be dancing with.

Gabriel can sympathize.

He twists and turns down a hallway or two, ostensibly looking for a bathroom and getting lost in a space that looks more industrial than anything, backstage staff ignoring him and walking to their destinations with purpose, everyone surrounded by white cinder block walls and exposed lighting in the ceilings.

It’s award season and he’s lonely, doesn’t know how to act at a party, and is dialing the number of his ex, scared he’ll actually pick up.

But Jack doesn’t pick up and Gabriel listens to his voicemail with a sick sort of fascination, delirious with the gut punch hit of what can only be love as Jack’s recorded voice says, “If you have this number you know who you’re calling. Leave me a message and I’ll call you back when I can. Talk to you then.”

“Hey,” Gabriel says, tired of pretending the distance between them is something he enjoys, that he doesn’t want to close it. That spending time together the way they have been these past few months is all he wants out of this relationship. “Hey, I need to see you. I want to see you. So fucking bad. I’m at an after party in West Hollywood and I don’t want to be here, Jack. Not without you. Please tell me where you are, so I can be there too.”

By the time Jack gets back to him, he’s halfway home and not nearly drunk enough, convinced he’s going to take up smoking something or another just to take the edge off.

“Would that work?” he’d asked Olivia before they parted ways under dirty parking lot lights, a sea of expensive cars all around them. “Would that help?”

“Jesus, Gabe, I don’t know,” she’d said, shoes off and skirt hiked up, lipstick on the back of her hand. She had a driver waiting for her, some car idling in the background, and her hair still looked perfect, the way it always does. “It’s not a catch all and, anyway, how do you know he won’t call on your way home?”

Gabriel’s pretending not to think about this when his phone starts to ring, the name on his console like it’s a song he can’t stop playing: _Jack_. He’s still not used to the feeling of answering the phone with the press of a button on the side of the steering wheel, but he does it as he eases into a stop, saying, “Yeah?”

“I’m at your place.” Jack’s voice is like the taste of water at the end of a five mile run, cool and refreshing and almost too much all at once. It makes Gabriel feel like he should have paced himself, and like he doesn’t care. He wants more. “Where are you?”

“Almost there,” Gabriel says, throat tight and eyes burning with the thought of coming home to something he hasn’t allowed himself to have for so long. “I know it’s stupid, living where I do, but there’s a spare key—”

“Already found it,” Jack interrupts him, sounding inpatient in a way so unlike him it makes Gabriel ache, “just wanted your permission to go inside.”

“Of course. You don’t have to—you’ve never have to ask, Jack.”

Jack is quiet on the other end of the line except for the click of a door being unlocked. And then he says, “But I always will.”

The rest of the drive is an eternity, Gabriel finding himself both dreading and anticipating the shift of the traffic lights from green to yellow. Alternatively desperate for more time to prepare himself and wanting to just get home already.

And when he does, when he pulls into his driveway and sees the light of the front porch on for him, he finds that he suddenly knows what to do. He’s aware it won’t be easy, that this is just one night among many that they’ll have to make it through, but this part has always been simple.

He gets out of the car and goes to the door and knocks.

The door is pulled open and it's startling, how much Jack looks like he belongs here. He's framed in light and smiling.

The sight makes something click into place in Gabriel’s mind and it’s all he can do to smile back.

For so long, this thing between them has felt like a race to make up for lost time, but the truth is there is so much time in front of them, and it's stretching forward, on and on. Gabriel sees that now, and it makes all the difference.

He reaches out and Jack takes his hand, leading him towards whatever comes next.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for coming along on the ride! for anyone wondering, i did always plan on this ending for them. these two...i see them as characters who will always have a rough go of it, no matter when or where they meet -- but i also firmly believe they're soulmates and things have a way of bringing you back to that person, every time.


End file.
